


Truth Changes Color Depending on the Light

by hansbekhart



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Altean Colony, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Breaking Up & Making Up, Consequences, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, If Canon is an in-universe propaganda, M/M, Masturbation, Past Violence, Politics, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Season/Series 08, Quintessence Sensitive Keith, Sexual Content, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Trauma, Trauma Recovery, Voyeurism, technically canon compliant, world building
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-01-15 05:52:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 46,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18492700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart
Summary: A few years after the war, it felt like half the planets in the Coalition had made their own versions of the Voltron story. Movies and television series and plays and musicals spring up in their footsteps, greeting Keith on almost every world he sets foot on.Keith never paid attention to any of it, when he could help it. He smiles when the refugee children sing their favorite Voltron songs for him, and grits his teeth when world leaders quote his life story at him, and does his best to just ignore all of it. He saveslivesthese days, tens of thousands of them all over the galaxy, where five years after the war’s end there are still so many planets just barely beginning to stumble back onto their feet. The humanitarian work they do with the Marmora is more important than Keith’s ego - and anyway, as Hunk says when he’s in a dark mood, shutting up and smiling is hardly the worst thing the Council ever asked them to do.All of this is to explain why he’s blindsided when Shiro's call comes.





	1. Chapter 1

Afterwards, the first thing that Keith remembers is the _Voltron Show_. His awareness coming back in little snatches: starched sheets and a lumpy pillow. The poorly hidden smells of a hospital. He’d been looking at the screen for longer than he’d been truly awake, little blobs of color waiting to resolve themselves into faces. The tinny, frenetic sound of the television overlapping with softly beeping monitors and far-off voices.

The television asked, “Maybe she just went out for some exercise, a little jogging in the morning, y’know?” Then it yawned. Another voice answered it, saying, “Who jogs this early?”

Cool fingers had laid themselves over his wrist, tugging on his focus. “Shiro?” Keith said, even as the shape by his bedside resolved itself into a face he has never known, not then, and not since. Long hair. Dark skin. Pointed ears. Pink slashes that tugged upwards when the person smiled. 

“Allura?” Keith asked, groggily trying again. 

“Aw, she’ll be back soon,” the television answered. The voice was relaxed and confident. The monitor sounds in Keith’s hospital room ratcheted up and back down again, cutting across the strange conversation happening on the TV. 

“Something strange is happening,” someone said. “This isn’t like her at all. I want an immediate search.”

“Everyone is fine,” the Altean said, and Keith had wanted so badly for it to be true that, god help him, he’d believed them.

Mostly, later on, that’s the part he remembers the clearest. His whole body sagging with trust and relief. The quiet marvel that they’d done it, they’d pulled it off, they’d _won_. It hadn’t seemed possible, but that was how the story always went, wasn’t it? 

He doesn’t remember crying, but he remembers that when he’d tried to wipe his face, his wrists had been cuffed to the bed.

 

 

-

 

 

A few years after the war, it felt like half the planets in the Coalition had made their own versions of the Voltron story. Movies and television series and plays and musicals spring up in their footsteps, greeting Keith on almost every world he sets foot on.

On some planets, Voltron itself barely features; for others the Paladins are front and center, acting out the events of the war in place of whatever cultural heroes and gods exist to give meaning to the people making these stories.

Pidge makes a half-hearted anthropological study of it, mapping out common themes and repeating imagery. Before he’d joined up with Keith and the Marmora, Hunk would call him up to ramble out the plots of the television shows and movies he saw, and then they’d spend hours telling each other the same stories, over and over, that both of them had been there for. Lance sends them gifts of whatever outlandish Voltron memorabilia he finds on New Altea, passed along to accumulate dust in Hunk’s living quarters as his stash of toy lions grows and grows. 

Keith never paid attention to any of it. At least, not when he could help it. All the memorabilia and movies are hard to avoid. On missions, refugee children sing their favorite Voltron songs for him. In high-stakes meetings, world leaders will tell him that patience yields focus, and then smile at him. 

He did once watch almost a full season of _BiiBiiBo!! Legendary BoBo_. It had been during the war, when the Bobiis were first testing out the Voltron format (eventually they were cranking out a new season every phoeb). At the time Keith had thought what was happening to Shiro was temporary, that he was either going to snap out of it any day or he would just fucking die for real this time. Keith had been so young that it hadn’t seemed possible for a person to just - go on that way, unraveling forever.

One night Coran had forced him out of Shiro’s quarters and into one of the open spaces on the _Atlas_. He’d turned on what Keith never stopped thinking of as a TV, and even though Keith had recognized immediately who all those stupid wigs and costumes were supposed to be, he’d been too exhausted to do anything but suck down the nutritional goo Coran shoved in his hand, and let it happen. He fell asleep on Coran’s shoulder listening to him cry with laughter, and when he woke up the show was still going and Coran was just crying. 

It’s easier when he just pretends that all of the stories are about things that happened to someone else. It’s been a long time since he was a Paladin of Voltron, since all of this started. 

So he smiles when the kids sing songs for him, and grits his teeth when strangers quote his life story at him, and does his best to just ignore all of it. He’s more than a decade away from being the kind of kid who’d happily punch the lights out of anyone who suggested they knew anything about him. He saves _lives_ these days, tens of thousands of them all over the galaxy, where five years after the war’s end there are still so many planets just barely beginning to stumble back onto their feet. The humanitarian work they do with the Marmora is more important than Keith’s ego - and anyway, as Hunk says when he’s in a dark mood, shutting up and smiling is hardly the worst thing the Council ever asked them to do. 

All of this is to explain why he’s blindsided when the call comes.

 

 

-

 

 

The call comes late at night, or what passes for night on Xaex, the planet they’ve been orbiting for two quintants. Keith is avoiding dreams. His eyes are dry. His body hurts all over. 

He’d given up on sleep two vargas ago and gone back to beating his head against the reason they were at Xaex to begin with. There had been trouble brewing for some time in Yihmi, which was one of Xaex’s nation states and the first that had thrown its lot in with the Voltron Coalition during the war. A faction of separatists had taken over Yihmi’s port, which was the main artery of trade in and out of the region.By itself, it wasn’t an insurmountable problem. The goods could be flown on Coalition shuttles until the separatists could be rooted out - except that there were rumors that three of Yihmi’s neighboring states were considering a blockade of _any_ goods entering Yihmi. Whether it was a resource grab or alignment with the separatists would be immaterial for the tens of thousands of civilians at risk of famine and starvation. But so far, the other leaders had refused to meet with a delegation from the Council, and allowed only a small contingent of the Marmora planetside. 

Keith stretches his aching back absently, and keeps swiping through topographical maps and briefings on the history of Xaex, looking for anything that could be helpful for their meeting tomorrow with Yihmi’s civilian leadership. Xaex had been a Galran colony for almost six thousand years and, like many of the older surviving colonies, had a population that was extensively intermixed with Galran DNA. Even so, the lack of communication from the other nations was baffling - surely no one on Xaex wanted a repeat of what had happened to Daibazaal four decaphoebs ago - 

He shakes his head, as if he could shake the thought loose. Daibazaal had been a mistake. They’d learned a lot since then. 

He finds himself contemplating the low ceiling above his head, which lacks features entirely: no cracks or discolorations or grids for his gaze to roam over. The engines are top of the line, some new way of refining Balmeran crystals that even Hunk was impressed by. They’re nearly silent, and Keith hasn’t slept right since they boarded. Only the wolf’s snuffly breathing has kept him from going crazy.

It’s almost a relief when the screen next to the bed lights up. His first thought is Kolivan - the supply chain interruption they’ve been half expecting for the last few quintants. Or maybe it’s Biekie, with an update about the ceasefire under consideration by the separatists. 

The transmission is from New Altea. He hesitates, his finger hovering over the keypad. The Council has given Keith and Hunk a pretty long leash this past decaphoeb, but maybe - Keith sighs. If they’re being recalled he’d rather just rip the bandage off, give Kolivan enough time to find replacements for them before the situation down on Xaex deteriorates any further.

But it’s Coran on the other side of the screen. For a moment Keith is thrown, and then his heart climbs right up into his throat and stays there. The panic is immediate and overwhelming, undeterred by the look on Coran’s face, which is no more and no less tired and quiet than he always is these days. 

“Keith,” Coran says. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Is everything okay?” Keith asks, even though he knows down to his bones that it isn’t. The wolf’s feet scratch against the floors as he heaves himself up to his feet and onto the bed, shaking it with his weight. The size of him is overwhelming, and Keith reaches out blindly.

“Everyone’s fine,” Coran says quickly, but his mustache quivers. “Just - ” 

He trails off, and as always, Keith can’t find it in himself to demand that Coran just spit out whatever’s on his mind. He waits, and searches behind Coran for clues. The transmission had come from New Altea rather than the _Atlas_ , and the oil paintings and faint glow of a fire in the background seems to confirm that Coran’s planetside. So he’s less concerned about the Council monitoring communications than he is about Shiro doing it. 

The grip around Keith’s throat doesn’t go away, exactly, but it does ease up - just a little.

Coran’s mustache twists up. “You haven’t seen it,” he says.

_Seen what?_ Keith wonders, but his patience is thin. “Coran,” he says. “Is Shiro okay?”

Coran’s eyes flick up. “As well as ever,” he says. “He wants to see you.”

The wolf makes a grumbly sort of sound in his throat. Keith unsnarls his fingers from his fur, apologetically smoothing over the hunks he’d grabbed too hard. “He does?” Keith asks, but as soon as the words are out of his mouth he’s shaking his head. The wolf’s eyes are bright even in the starlit gloom of his quarters, and infinitely easier to meet than Coran’s. “He doesn’t,” Keith says, more firmly. “You know he doesn’t.”

“Keith,” Coran sighs. The sound of it makes Keith’s shoulders ache. The mustache has twisted up so far that Coran might as well be nibbling on it, but all he says is, “Will you come?”

The wolf groans, and lays his heavy head down on Keith’s knees. The weight of him grounds Keith, sinks him down into the too-soft mattress beneath them. The oily texture of his fur too dense to be anything but real, even if nothing else feels that way.

It’s been three years since Keith has been back to New Altea. Since he was unceremoniously, literally locked out of the _Atlas_. His access revoked, his biometrics no longer recognized. He’s seen Shiro since, of course. On Coalition broadcasts, standing silent and square-jawed on the bridge of the _Atlas_ , presiding over the signing of some new peace treaty. Or in the same old news footage of Shiro the Hero that gets used across the galaxy. And sometimes, accidentally, in the movies, an avatar of hundreds of different species.

He wants the moment to feel bigger. He wants it with the same biting greed that he used to want everything with, back when he was a teenager. He wants it to be Shiro on the screen, begging Keith to come home. No, not begging - just asking. Steady and warm, the way he used to be. Keith used to fold himself up in the soft timbre of Shiro’s voice, comforted like a little kid with a blanket, or like he was coming home. If their lives really were like the _Voltron Show_ , there would be swelling music. Instead it’s just him, his swirling heart and closed-up throat, and a smelly space wolf sprawled across his legs - left with the only answer he can ever give, when Shiro’s the one who’s asking.

 

 

-

 

 

Hunk has seen it: It being the latest version of the _Voltron Show_.

“It’s not even the first time the Alteans have made one,” Keith says irritably. “I don’t get what’s different about this one.” 

“It’s the first time they’ve made one about the end of the war,” Hunk tells him. “Trust me, it’s super different.” He’d actually been watching it when Keith stepped across the hall and knocked on his door, after hanging up with Coran. Keith had caught a brief glimpse of Voltron spinning through blackness before Hunk had lunged at the remote and the screen went dark. When he’d turned towards Keith his face had been covered in snot and tears.

They’d stared at each other for a long, silent moment. Hunk’s nonplussed expression felt like a mirror of Keith’s own. 

“Shiro’s calling us in,” Keith said eventually

He watched Hunk travel through a dozen things to say. Finally, he settled on an emphatic, “Well, _fuck_.”

He fills Keith in on the Alteans’ new series while he packs, and Keith starts the arduous process of registering their new itinerary with the Coalition. Keith’s only giving him giving him half an ear: there are dozens of permissions required to move through Coalition space these days, even when you’re a former Paladin of Voltron. Maybe especially when you are. There are a lot of tabs kept on the four of them. Probably even Shiro too, though as far as Keith knows it’s been a while since he’s been off the _Atlas_. Mostly Keith’s just calling “But that’s not what _happened_ ,” through his open door, and Hunk is yelling back, “I know, it’s total garbage, but you won’t believe that they did next -”

Kolivan’s face pops up on the monitor, cancelling out Keith’s teludav request just as he’s about to send it - _dammit_ , the thing had taken him almost fifteen minutes to fill out. “I was about to call you,” Keith says guiltily. 

“When will you return?” Kolivan asks, without preamble.

“Soon,” Keith says, and then adds, helplessly, “Shiro called.”

Kolivan’s ears pull back. Distantly, Keith can still hear Hunk shouting commentary through their open doors. “I see,” Kolivan says. If it were anyone else, Keith would bristle at the change in tone. 

“It’s an emergency,” Keith says. He thinks. Maybe. He hopes it isn’t. He doesn’t even know why he’s explaining himself to Kolivan, who at this point has been risking his life with Keith for more than seven decaphoebs, who has gotten Keith drunker than any other person alive, and who is sometimes also on those Coalition broadcasts with Shiro, standing wordlessly in the background as the Council announces another victory against the separatists. Kolivan knows all about Shiro. Knows all about Shiro and Keith.

“Of course,” Kolivan says. “We have you covered. Please keep us apprised of the situation and if any, ah, assistance might be required.”

Keith lets out a shaky breath. Kolivan’s mouth is downturned, his expression unruffled - but his ears are still pressed unhappily back against his skull. “Thank you,” Keith says, and means it.

As soon he disconnects, the machine beeps again. He opens up the notification to find out that all of his paperwork has been filed, and is already approved. Keith opens up their travel itinerary with thinned lips. The normal turnaround time for teludav transport approval is five quintants, but they’re scheduled for a crossing in six standard vargas. He hopes Shiro at least covered his tracks well, filing this garbage.

Keith stands and stretches. He’d shrugged back into his clothes and boots out of habit. He’d never really _un_ packed, so _packing_ is only a matter of stuffing his toothbrush back into a side pocket, and then, looking guiltily over his shoulder, mixing his dirty laundry back into the duffle with the clean. That accomplished, he goes back across the hall to check on Hunk’s progress.

He finds Hunk sitting cross-legged on his bed - too small for any of them but especially too small for Hunk, even these days - staring blindly into middle ground. He doesn’t look up when Keith moves to stand over him, just keeps on staring. His face is still blotchy from crying. 

“You okay, bud?” Keith asks, but Hunk just shakes his head. 

“I figured it out,” Hunk tells him bleakly. “What must’ve got Shiro worked up enough to call you.”

At least it looks like he’s done packing. The wolf is taking up all but a few bare inches of the floor, so Keith sits down onto the bed next to Hunk and then slides all the way down, lacing his fingers together over his belly. Hunk’s ceiling is as blank and featureless as Keith’s. They must make these ships all at once, Keith thinks, not built piece by piece the way the _Atlas_ was, or the Lions were: no joints or mistakes to show the worker’s hand.

Hunk sighs deeply and lays down too, shifting around until their sides line up together, shoulders to knees. The crown of his head presses into Keith’s neck. 

“Maybe Shiro stepped on a crack,” Keith says, but the truth is that he couldn’t even begin to guess. He used to know Shiro better than any person alive, but that was a long time ago now. It’s been eleven years since Shiro left the world behind for Kerberos. More than ten since Keith followed him to the stars, and into a war. Nine years since Coran introduced the first _Voltron Live Show_. Six years since their return to Earth. 

Five years since the end of the war, and -

“It’s because of Allura,” Hunk says, as if Keith didn’t say anything at all.

 

 

-

 

 

Five and a half vargas later, they’re dropped high above New Altea. The sun is setting behind the blue planet, and the fading light picks up the shielding and communication bands and refracts it back onto the surface in a kaleidoscope of shifting pinks and purples and oranges. The capital city has grown and grown in the years since the war, but for the first few moments Keith doesn’t see that part at all. He’s blinded by the light, caught up by those colors and the memory of desert grit on his skin.

“Hnnngh,” he says between his teeth.

“There’s a bin in the back,” Hunk tells him, and guides them up towards the _Atlas_ , tucked just barely into New Altea’s thermosphere like a balloon about to float away. Keith had almost forgotten how _huge_ it is. This far away from the surface the _Atlas_ gleams white and gold all over, unaffected by the colors down below. As their little craft draws closer he loses the shape of the ship entirely, the bow and the stern gobbling up the stars behind. Three years of the place clogging up all of Keith’s dreams, and now he feels like he’s stepped into a nightmare. He doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t want to be anywhere near the _Atlas_. He’s not ready for this. Whatever Shiro wants it isn’t worth this.

They’re swallowed up into the _Atlas’_ shadow.

Keith takes the controls back for the landing. The hangar they’re directed into is mostly empty: just two other standard Coalition shuttles and a lone MFE abandoned in the corner. He hadn’t seen any traffic coming in and out of the other hangers, but even in the rare instances that the _Atlas_ is off-duty there are dozens of staff that live aboard full time. Only the emergency lights are lit, and the corners of the hangar are shadowed. No one’s waiting for them. At least, not in person.

Keith powers down the shuttle, but as he moves to open the bay doors Hunk’s hand covers his own. The expression on his face is intense enough to startle Keith out of his own head. “I just wanted to say before we got out there,” Hunk says, flicking his head towards the cockpit window and the empty hangar. “Just in case it _needs_ to be said. I’m gonna follow your lead on this one.” 

It’s a smart move. Strategic. It could be the last moment they can speak privately while on board the _Atlas_ , or maybe anywhere near New Altea. And it’s a relief to know where he stands with Hunk. There’s so much he wants to say, but all of it sounds pathetic and childish in his head. Hunk’s not asking if Keith is okay. He already knows Keith isn’t. He’s letting Keith know he trusts him anyway. 

Keith lets out the breath he’d been holding. “Thank you,” he says. He turns his hand over and gives Hunk’s a squeeze, to show that he means it. Then he lets go, and lowers the door.

The second they step foot onto the _Atlas_ , the hangar lights brighten. On the other side of the long room, an exhaust fan starts to blow, and the air warms. A soft, indefinable humming sound surrounds them. The hangar door slides open, and beyond it, a light goes on. “Ugh,” Hunk says, hefting his bag a little higher on his shoulder. “I hate when he does this. It’s _creepy_.”

“It’s not creepy,” Keith says, but it’s a knee-jerk defense and they both know it.

Another light flickers on as they step into the hallway, and then another. As they move through the corridor the lights behind them flicker off. Hunk’s right. It _is_ creepy. The hall itself is creepy too - it feels like it’s breathing. It narrows as they move farther into the _Atlas_ , with tight little gaps between the main panels, segmented like the body of an insect. They’re not the same halls Keith used to walk through in the few months they all served on the _Atlas_ \- but strangely, that makes it a little easier. The panic that gripped him when the _Atlas_ came into view is still there, but he’s managing it. He’ll be fine seeing Shiro. He’ll be fine.

Hunk keeps up a running monologue as they walk, tapping the tips of his fingers together. “Seriously, this is a horror movie. I mean I know this is technically an active war ship and the crown jewel of the Coalition or whatever, but would it kill them to put in some plants or windows or something? Art. Art would be nice. Like a living gallery of all the cool places the ship has been.” 

The flickering, soft hum covers the click of their boots and the wolf’s claws with major notes, plucked like strings. The air is the absolute perfect temperature. 

“Ugh, no, wait, that would probably end up like one of the really creepy museums in the capitol - did you ever go to those Keith? No, I didn’t think so - anyway I don’t really recommend it, they’re very, you know, _colonial_. Grand and peaceful conquests of humble natives living under the yoke of Galra oppression until we showed them the light. That kind of thing, _really_ obvious. But you know the Council loves that stuff. Once they got the museums up they held practically all the banquets there. The last one I had to cater, there was this whole Galacto-Modernist special exhibit and basically all of them were Voltron’s face and it give me _actual nightmares_.” 

There’s a smell that Keith can’t quite place. Each time there’s a fork in the road, the lights direct them where to go. When Keith looks over his shoulder, the halls behind them have changed: swallowed up, part of the ever-shifting landscape of Shiro’s ship.

They hear the others before they see them, because if there’s anything the movies get right about their lives, it’s that Lance is and always will be loud. Behind Keith, the wolf gives a little whine and dashes eagerly past them. A second later they hear Pidge’s joyful shout: “Kosmo!” and Lance, disbelieving: “Keith’s here? No _way_!”

“Believe it,” Keith says as they come through the doorway, and then everything is a flurry of sound and excitement, arms wrapping around him and Hunk, the four of them drawing into a tight knot of bodies. He clings back desperately. The grin on his face aches in the best way. 

He saw Pidge only a few months ago, and he chats with Lance whenever they can, but the last time the four of them were all together was more than two decaphoebs ago, and that had been for Allura’s Day, which was a day that always only feels like an inevitable end. He looks at Hunk over the crush of Pidge and Lance, and Hunk looks the same way Keith feels.

“I’m just chopped masneat,” Hunk says, wiping tears from his eyes. “I see how it is. Keith shows up and I’m just -”

“Shut up,” Pidge orders, and tightens her grip around them so fiercely that they both gasp for air.

“Okay,” Hunk wheezes, “I really missed all of us being together but especially -“ He leaves the words unfinished as he does his best to lift all four of them into the air.

It’s a few minutes before he notices that Coran is there too, watching them at a distance. He straightens when Keith catches his eye, but he doesn’t try to hide the wistful look on his face. 

The others let Keith untangle himself, and as a unit they turn to face Coran, and the closed door behind him. “What’s this all about?” Keith asks. The wolf pads forward and sniffs at the bottom of the door, his tail lashing back and forth, and then huffs loudly through his nose and goes to drape himself over one of the couches.

“If I could explain, I would,” Coran says. “But I’m as in the dark as all of you.”

He has a guilty expression that Keith doesn’t need an explanation for: Coran knows at least something about _something_. But he doesn’t need to say anything either. Pidge has it covered.

“What even made you think it was a good idea to let him watch it?” she demands, arms folded across her chest. Lance nods, his chin jutting out. _It_ , again: so whatever message got conveyed to the others, they also think the reason they were called home has to do with whatever thin fiction the Alteans just put out into the universe.

Coran sniffs. “Bold of you to assume I can do anything to stop Number One from doing whatever he wants. He has full access to all of the ship’s capabilities, including _watching the television_.” He adds, a little defensively, “And he isn’t a _prisoner_.”

“You watched it too,” Hunk says.

“Of course,” Coran answers, like it’s obvious.

“Keith’s probably the only one who didn’t,” Lance says, his tone airy. But when Keith glances over Lance’s mouth is tight, and his thumbs tucked into his belt. He’s not checking to see if Keith takes the bait, so Keith doesn’t. He turns back to Coran, but then sighs. The thought of interrogating Coran when Shiro can hear everything anyway - can monitor their heartbeats and check their core temperature or pump a nerve gas in through the vents if he didn’t like the way the conversation was going - is stupid.

“All right,” he says. “Take us in.”

Coran just looks at him. The others do too. “What?” Keith asks, irritated. The look on their faces makes him feel like he’s missed a step. The longer they stare at him the more his stomach twists up into knots, wondering what he’s missing, if something _happened_ \- 

“Keith, we’ve been here for like two hours already,” Lance says. He waves a hand towards the door on the other side of the room. “If _that_ was gonna open for us, we’d be in there already telling _you_ why we’re here.”

“Oh,” Keith says. No one says anything else. Even the little hum is gone. The world has gone quiet around him.

“Okay,” Keith says, and squares his shoulders. He knows that the door isn’t going to open. He knows it. He’s going to walk over there and the door will stay closed and he could beat his fists bloody for all the difference it would make. 

The door opens, and Keith steps through.

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

Over the years, Keith has spent a lot of time thinking about Shiro. Wondering how he was. If he was okay. If he was being cared for. If he still _needed_ to be cared for, like he had towards the end the war. What he was doing at that very moment, so many tens of thousands of miles of away from wherever Keith found himself, chasing a purpose through the galaxy. If he missed Keith. If he missed the rest of the Paladins. If he missed Allura or Matt or Adam or everyone else they lost in the war.

He tried not to picture it - to _really_ imagine those moments in Shiro’s life, because he _did_ know the answer to that question. For months after Keith left the _Atlas_ , news would trickle out from Coran to Pidge to Lance and then to Keith. He never heard from Coran directly, even though Coran had taken over responsibility for Shiro with all the diligence of a luuktuk, nursing the very last chick in his nest. Keith had clung to the gossip like a lifeline, trying to make sense of his abandonment. (It just _hadn’t_ made sense, with everything they’d been through together, to just be thrown away. Not after all the times Shiro had said he’d never give up on Keith and _proved it_ , it just -) Without Lance keeping him up-to-date, and his mother there to pick up the pieces, he doesn’t know what he would have done. The Council hid Shiro’s condition well enough that the Marmora never once got wind of the _Atlas_ ’ evacuations, or its near crash into the surface of New Altea. If you only saw the official broadcasts, then everything was fine. 

It would have been easier to imagine Shiro marrying someone else. Leaving the battlefield behind and finding peace with his new husband. Sometimes Keith did just that, instead of thinking of Shiro all alone, trapped on the _Atlas_ because someone had accidentally plugged his fractured brain into it, and never bothered to try and get him loose.

He finds himself in a long, dim hallway. As the door slides shut behind him, lights flicker on like torches along the wall. They illuminate columns set in geometric patterns of blue and black, soaring high above his head. The floor under his feet is patterned too - delicate inlays of white and black that are so familiar they make his chest ache. It’s hard to believe he’s still somewhere in the belly of the _Atlas_ , that time and space haven’t warped again and set his feet down in a ship that was destroyed almost eight years ago. The light picks up motes in the air and this, too, he knows - how different it had been from Earth, that even the dust sparkled like diamonds. 

For a long moment Keith just stands there, struck silent once again by the grace of the Castle of Lions. 

The grand hallway leads straight into the Castle - _led_ into it, and mimicked here by whatever magic Shiro has worked - and as light reaches deeper into the depths Keith can see the broad stairway, the low steps that curl up on the sides towards its banisters, and, at a distance, a figure sitting at the base, waiting for him.

Shiro looks up. He braces a hand on the banister and pushes himself to his feet. He takes a step forward and Keith is breathless just to see him, sick and dizzy with it. Shiro takes another step, and another. The look on his face has broken Keith’s heart a thousand times before. His mouth shapes Keith’s name, and that’s the moment that instinct overtakes because there’s no world, no timeline, no universe where Keith won’t run to him.

Shiro draws him in with their clasped hands. His other hand cups the back of Keith’s skull. Keith’s free arm wraps around Shiro’s broad torso and his fingers curl into claws, hanging on to the back of his shirt. Both of them are shaking. It’s so easy to be held. It soothes something wild and hurting in Keith’s chest. When he was a kid just being _around_ Shiro made the whole world suddenly bearable.

But he’s not a kid anymore. He can’t do this to himself. Not again.

Reluctantly, he pulls away. Shiro lets him go but his hands linger, hovering over Keith’s braid, the crown of his hair. He looks good, camera ready. His hair has gotten long again. His beard could use a trim. But he’s clean and neat and he smells nice and _god_ , his smile looks just like it used to. 

“It’s good to see you,” Keith says, and wishes he didn’t mean it quite so much.

The hum around them swells in Keith’s skull, buzzing with emotion, and says, _It’s good to see you too, Keith. I’ve missed you so much_.

Keith tucks his chin into his chest. It’s not true. Shiro’s lying, to spare Keith’s feelings or whatever. But abruptly he doesn’t want to dig his fingers into the wound, doesn’t want to prove himself right. “What did you call us in for, Shiro?” Keith asks. “Is it - does this have something to do with Allura?”

Shiro lights up. Even the room around them gets brighter, the air warmer. His hands grip Keith’s upper arms, closing the gap that Keith had put between them. _Yes! Yes, **exactly** \- I **knew** you’d figure it out too, you’re so - _

“Hunk,” Keith interrupts. “It was Hunk. I uh, I didn’t watch it. I’ve been. Real busy.”

_On Xaex - of course_ , Shiro says immediately. _How is the situation there?_

Anger flares abruptly in Keith’s chest. Had Shiro been keeping tabs on him? Maybe it was naive to expect the same courtesy Keith gave to him, to just pretend the _Atlas_ didn’t exist unless he was forced to acknowledge it. He can feel himself hit a wall: so full of memories that he’s ticked over into feeling nothing at all. 

Shiro didn’t have the right to know Keith’s life. Not anymore. Unconsciously he tucks his elbows into his ribs, breaking Shiro’s hold. Consciously, he puts a little more distance between them. “Urgent,” he says shortly. “We’ll be needed back as soon as this is handled.” He stares at Shiro expectantly.

Shiro’s arms hang down at his sides. His face is very serious. The prosthetic crackles faintly between his shoulder and the connection at his elbow port. Keith knows from long experience that if you accidentally get your fingers in between them it will feel like you’ve been bitten by a scrikkul, and ache for days afterwards. 

_Keith, I - before we join the others, I wanted to say -_

Keith says nothing. Just stares at Shiro from the other side of the wall, bricked in with his own anger. What was there to say now, that couldn’t have been said years ago? What could Shiro want so badly that he’d call in all of the Paladins, but still made Pidge and Lance and Coran wait in the other room for hours? And that thought, too, sticks in Keith’s throat. Shiro had asked everyone to come home. Not just Keith.

_I, I wanted to,_ Shiro tries again, and loses the thread. He rubs a hand over his beard and then around the back of his neck: a nervous habit from when he used to shave the bottom parts of his hair. He’d wear a red spot into his hairline, studying for missions.

Finally he drops the hand, and looks at Keith straight on. A hopeless smile hangs crooked on his face. Finally, he asks: _What color socks are you wearing?_

Keith scrapes his lower lip through his teeth. He pinches his pant leg above the knee and tugs. He watches relief travel all the way through Shiro’s body: the soft noise he makes as he exhales, the way his shoulders slump. When Shiro looks up again his eyes are soft. Keith’s stupid heart gives an unwelcome squeeze to see it. 

_Thank you, Keith_ , Shiro says, very sincerely.

“Don’t,” Keith says, and shakes his head. “Don’t thank me.”

 

 

-

 

 

_ What do you remember about the end of the war? _

The question lands in crashing, uncomfortable silence. After Shiro had allowed the other Paladins into his inner sanctum, they’d drifted naturally to what Shiro used to call the conference room: the long white room with its long white table where they’d hosted alien delegations, building what became the Voltron Coalition one catered dinner at a time. 

Lance called it the dining room instead, because they took most of their own meals there as well, just the seven of them. Family meals, as Hunk would say. Back then the Earthlings would arrange themselves on one side and Allura and Coran on the other. Today Shiro had taken his usual seat and it was Keith who broke tradition by taking the one opposite. Hunk settled next to Keith, and Pidge on his other side. Lance joined Shiro, and although Coran was hovering at a polite distance, Keith expected he would seat himself on Shiro’s side as well once the food was served. 

The seat at the head of the table remains irreplaceably empty.

_What do you remember about the end of the war?_ Shiro asks again.

Pidge shrugs. Hunk’s fingers drum on his knee. Lance laces his fingers behind his head and drawls, “All the awesome parades and parties.”

Keith snorts. He can feel Shiro’s eyes flick towards him, and tries to turn it into a cough. He doesn’t meet Shiro’s gaze. He looks at the table instead, and finds a marvel: it’s got the same pattern of chips and cracks that the real one had. Keith used to spend overlong meetings digging into the soft stone, scrabbling away until his fingernails filled up with white dust. 

“That’s kind of a big question, Shiro,” Hunk says uncomfortably. “Like, what do you mean exactly?”

Shiro spreads his mismatched hands on the table like he’s promising no tricks. _Just what I said. It’s only a question, Hunk. What do you **remember**? _

What Keith remembers is how different the faces around him used to look. Not at the end of the war, but at its beginning - or, at least, the beginning of the war for them. 

He remembers once seeing the cross section of an enormous, ancient tree set up on its end, with little markers showing where and what humans were doing when this tree was only ten or fifteen feet across. One little peg for _the first human on the moon_ , almost touching the soft bark ringing the outside. One little peg for _Columbus lands in Puerto Rico_ , not even halfway to its heart. Ten thousand years of Galra rule was an unimaginable length of time, longer than any human frame of reference Keith could name, and still they’d sat at this table really believing they could end it and bring freedom to the whole universe - which was just another scale of arrogance unimaginable in its scope, as limitless and uncountable as stars. 

Here, around this table, they wear their war in human terms. In the worn lines of their faces. The grey in Lance’s hair. The sag of skin around Hunk’s jaw from the weight he can’t carry anymore, his guts torn to pieces and stitched back together not by an Altean pod, but by inferior human hands. The blunt edges of Pidge’s hair, grown in awkward lengths to cover what human hands had done to her, trying to relieve pressure from blood pooling in her skull. None of them really look like the heroes they’re made out to be.

“Haggar opened a rift in reality,” Pidge says. “We went in after her. We closed it. End of story.”

_ That’s it? That’s all you remember? _

Pidge sneers at Shiro. She’s been radiating fury ever since she stepped foot into Shiro’s Castle, thick enough that even Lance probably notices. 

“You know it’s not,” Hunk says, when she doesn’t say anything else. His voice slides gently through the tension. “But it’s not _just_ a question. We’re not here for questions. We’re here because you asked. Don’t play games, Shiro. Not with us.”

Shiro looks down at the table, abashed. First blood to Hunk. But under his blush, Keith can see Shiro’s eyes flickering minutely back and forth. Calculating his odds. Scrying how to win. One thing that the movies always leave out is that Shiro is a genius just as much as Hunk and Pidge are. Before Kerberos he used to calculate infinite probabilities for fun. As the Black Paladin he was their master strategist, absorbing Galra colonial history as easily as he did battle plans and diplomatic rules. After his death (and resurrection, and death, and resurrection) it had become an obsession, a refuge of safety, as if by controlling every minutiae of battle he could change the outcome of it. As if the color of Keith’s socks could set them on the right timeline to win the war.

“Shiro,” Keith says, and somehow it sounds gentle too. “Come on. Tell us why we’re here.”

Shiro can’t sigh anymore. Instead the lights around them saturate and then dim, matching the lift and fall of his shoulders. He signals to Coran, who moves smoothly into action, outwardly unaffected by the conversation. A plate in front of each of them, platters in the middle piled high with food. Coran’s cooking has never been more than passable, so these must have been prepared by the on-board chefs. Keith glances over at Hunk, who looks skeptical - but his standards always were high. 

_Defender of the Universe_ , Shiro says. 

“What?” Keith asks.

Hunk sighs, “Keith, we talked about this.”

“Oh, the thing. The Altean show.”

Shiro’s mouth quirks. He’s staring at Keith with an expression that’s hard to look at directly, so Keith doesn’t. He helps himself to the feast, and Shiro says nothing. Just watches the rest of them dig in, Hunk picking carefully through to find what won’t clog up his scarred intestinal tract, giving him days of agony or a trip to the hospital. 

_ Why didn’t you watch it, Keith? _

Keith frowns down at his plate. That’s a big question too. He’d been busy with the Marmora for the last few phoebs. He had forgotten it was coming out. He just hadn’t wanted to see Shiro’s face, or the faces of the people who weren’t with them anymore. It seemed a little masochistic to watch someone reenact the worst moments of his life. “What’s the point?” he settles on, finally. “If I want someone to make up lies about Voltron I just call Lance.”

Lance laughs outright, pleased. “My narrative skills are unparalleled,” he agrees. 

_ So why did the rest of you watch it? _

The table is silent again. Lance looks like he’s starting to regret choosing Shiro’s side of the table. Keith puts down his fork and folds his arms across his chest. “They’re all like that,” he says, as if Shiro hadn’t said anything else. “You didn’t call us the last time the Puigians came out with a new Voltron opera.”

_ The Puigians aren’t the controlling force in the Voltron Coalition, _ Shiro says. _Puig doesn’t dictate trade laws and control access to the only functioning cross-universal travel system left. Puig didn’t win the war. Puig isn’t still involved in multiple conflicts with members seeking to leave the Coalition, or seeking reparations for wartime damages. _

“I wanted to see our friends,” Hunk says. 

“Yeah,” Lance says, very softly. “Me too.” 

Pidge’s head is bowed over her plate, her hand clenched so tight around her fork that her knuckles are white. Keith puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes. This time Shiro is the one who looks away.

_ Our forces have managed to isolate the separatists to just twelve planets, but I’ve been uh,  _ Shiro says, _ monitoring Council communication. They don’t like how quickly the movement spread to begin with. It’s not a coincidence that the Coalition released these movies now. Voltron has never been just a story for the Alteans. Not ten thousand years ago, and not now. _

“Yeah,” Lance says. “We kinda got that from all the parades and parties. Alteans are real good at marketing.”

Shiro’s eyes gleam. _Exactly. That’s why I watched Defender of the Universe. I wanted to know what they would say about everything that happened after we came out of the quintessence field._

Pidge’s shoulder jumps under Keith’s hand. “They changed it,” she scoffed. “The Council changed all of it. They didn’t even put themselves in the story. They made it so we were just _gone_ for three whole years of the war - whoops, time slip, who cares about the hundreds of planets we’d liberated at that point. Who cares about the Coalition Allura built. ”

Like always, Lance’s whole body tenses at the sound of Allura’s name. It doesn’t stop Pidge, but not much ever does. “The _Atlas_ , the _Syncline_ , Haggar, the schism at the Colony - Allura, even m-my brother - they just _made up_ their own story. They put all of it on us. Like the fate of the universe really rested in the hands of a bunch of teenagers. But _who cares_ , Shiro. They won the war five years ago and look, now there’s peace and stability in the universe just like everyone. Always. Wanted. Who _cares_ what they say about us.”

Shiro frowns. _It’s not about us,_ he says. _Allura’s alive. That changes everything._

For a moment Keith’s vision actually whites out. It’s so far beyond what he thought Shiro was going to say that when Lance and Pidge start yelling it doesn’t sound like language. The words are just sounds that strobe in and out of his ears. When he looks over Hunk is frozen, his face blank except for the shiver in his jaw. 

No, Keith thinks. It’s a complete sentence. Denial so vast that it takes a moment to identify the pain that follows close on his heels: Disappointment. He should have known better. He shouldn’t have been fooled by the clean hair and clothes, the eye contact. The softness of that damn smile. The well-worn comfort of being held.

This again.

But it’s Coran that shakes him loose. The look on Coran’s face, cracked wide. It’s been a few seconds at most since Shiro spoke but there are tears coursing down the old man’s cheeks, like they’d only been waiting for the words and the hope that could follow, if Keith doesn’t do something quickly. 

“Stop!” Keith slams his hands down on the table surface. The heel of his hand catches on the edge of the plate and sets it spinning and clattering against his silverware. Stunned, everyone looks up at him. He doesn’t remember standing but he is, one knee braced against his chair like his body was planning to launch itself across the table at Shiro. Lance is on his feet too, but the anger’s already fading from his face - he’s got one hand out towards Keith instead.

“Everyone settle down,” Keith spits. His chest is heaving for air. When did he get so dizzy? “Shiro,” he says. “How do you know Allura’s alive?”

_It’s the only thing that makes sense_ , Shiro says eagerly. _Defender’s a propaganda piece, we shouldn’t expect it to be accurate, but the story is contradictory even for the message they’re trying to send. It’s obvious that the Council wants to distance themselves from the members of the colony that sided with Haggar - make our side out to be heroes. But according to my calculations, there’s a ninety six point -_

“ _Shiro_ ,” Keith says. “How do you _know_.” 

Shiro glares at him. The look stings, but Keith doesn’t move. Doesn’t stand down. In the peripheral, he watches Coran sags back into his seat. He doesn’t look at any of them. He doesn’t make a sound. He wipes the back of his knuckles over his cheeks, over and over. Doggedly, Shiro says, _If you watch it, you’ll see the evidence for yourself. The ‘missing’ three years. The first transformation of the Atlas. They blame the death of VeXilum on Haggar. Putting the decision to go to Oriande on Allura’s shoulders, instead of defending Sanook and Siiz from Haggar’s Robeasts. Killing the Guardian of Oriande, for god’s sake -_

“How does that add up to Allura being alive,” Keith grits out. “No calculations. No probabilities. What is your _proof_.”

Lance’s chair scrapes across the floor as he sits, reassured somehow that no one’s going to fling themselves at Shiro. Keith can hear Hunk’s slow, measured breathing. Shiro’s tucked his chin into his chest, mulish. 

When he speaks it’s with a harsh, electronic buzz to the words, like he’s gritting them out through his teeth. _I don’t remember how she died_ , Shiro says. _I don’t remember **anything**. I remember - light. I remember knowing that whole realities were being shredded in front of us. I remember being merged with all of you. But I don’t remember - _

There’s a slight click, a sound like Shiro swallowing his words, but Keith still startles badly when what follows is the gravel of Haggar’s voice, called up straight from all of their nightmares. 

Haggar says, _I’m sorry, but the damage is done. There’s nothing left to save._

It’s even worse when Allura’s voice follows, strong and clear as if she were standing right behind them. I _can change the quintessence within your vessel. Your son taught me how to transform it from a destructive force into a life giving force. But I cannot do it alone._

_ But that would require … _

_ I know the risks. _

“Stop it,” Lance says. “Shiro!” 

There’s a sizzle, and a crackle of light - and then Lance yelps, he and Shiro jerking away from each other. Lance’s first two fingers are smoking faintly. He’d reached out to grab Shiro’s shoulder and accidentally stuck his hand in the energy field of Shiro’s prosthetic.

_I’m afraid this is where we part ways_ , Allura says. _This is our only chance to undo what has been done, to save all of existence. I have to take it. It is my purpose. Your paths go on. Mine ends here._

“Stop,” Lance says again, deadly serious. His injured hand is curled in between them, but he doesn’t break eye contact. Allura’s voice cuts out abruptly. Even the buzz of Shiro’s electronic voice goes silent. 

Coran is the first to speak. He moves to Lance’s side and says, very gently, “Let me have a look at that, Number Three.”

“It’s fine,” Lance says. He’s still staring at Shiro. 

There’s another soft click as Shiro’s voice comes back online. The hum stretches and softens the silence. He eyes Lance, wary and calculating. _I don’t have proof_ , he confesses. His gaze flicker to Keith and back. _But I know that we would never, ever have left her behind._

“Shiro,” Hunk says carefully. “What are you saying here? That the Coalition is covering up how Allura died? For, for - for some kind of propaganda?”

_ She’s not dead. I don’t believe it.  _

“Keith,” Pidge says. She’s looking to him. Hunk is too. She juts out her chin and jerks it in Shiro’s direction. The lights flash as Shiro follows the motion, sees the shift across the table. 

Keith squares his shoulders. The words feel ugly in his mouth. He says, “Shiro, think about the kind of accusation you’re making. Think of what we’d be risking to go against the Coalition. The past five years have been the first peace and stability the universe has known in thousands of years. Regardless of what - of what happened during the war, Allura’s dead and we’re still here. You can’t ask us to throw all of that away on probabilities.” 

As soon as the words are out of his mouth, that little skip of hesitation, he knows he’s made a mistake. Shiro’s focus narrows on him painfully. The hum at the back of his head sharpens and whines like a mosquito. Can everyone else hear it? He can’t tell.

“Whoa,” Hunk says, and the hum subsides. He looks down and sees Hunk’s hand on his arm, softly urging him back into his chair. “Hey, come on. Look, no one’s talking about overthrowing the Coalition here, right? Right. We’re just talking. And -” here he yawns, big and affected, “- I don’t know about you guys, but I’m exhausted. Xaex has a twenty-three varga day and man, those extra three vargas always mess me up. How about we get some rest, clear our heads, and pick it up again in the morning? You look tired too, Shiro. How long’s it been since you slept?”

Shiro’s lips press together. He sags back into his chair. _A while_ , he admits.

Hunk shifts in his seat, his posture expanding to include the rest of them. “Sound good, guys?”

Coran stays with Shiro in the dining room, only looking up to tell them that their rooms were already made up. “Call if you need anything at all,” he says. Shiro doesn’t even look at Keith. Then it’s just the four of them, the sound of their boots muffled in the wide halls. They don’t speak as they head down the long hallways to their quarters. Where their quarters had been on the Castle of Lions. The geometry of the castle gets stranger as they walk along, reaching either the limits of Shiro’s memory or his attention span. 

It’s an uncomfortable silence. Lance is bursting at the seams, restlessly kicking his feet and shifting his shoulders. Hunk stares at the stone underfoot, his expression solemn. Pidge’s focus is on the display from her wrist. Looks like she’s flicking through travel permissions. It’s not a surprise when she stops and tells them, “I’m going home in the morning. I didn’t come here for this.”

Keith folds his arms over his chest, staring down at the gaps between them. “You all saw _Defender_. What did you think? You think it’s possible?”

Lance makes a small, hurt sounding noise. “I don’t know,” Hunk says slowly. “But I don’t know what the Council would do to him if they heard him saying stuff like that, either.”

“Besides what they already did?” Pidge says, sour. 

“Yeah,” Hunk tells her. “Besides what they already did. And we don’t know what they’d do to us, either.”

“Can’t he hear us saying all this stuff?” Lance wonders, craning his eyes up as if he could spot the cameras.

“Focus, guys,” Keith says, “and yeah, he can hear us.”

“I don’t remember either,” Pidge says. She shuts down the projection from her wrist computer. “I know we went into the light after Haggar, but after that - ”

“Hospital,” Lance agrees. 

“Buried memories?” Hunk guesses. “Magic?” 

“He _is_ talking about going up against the Coalition,” Keith says. “You know he is. And he’ll do it with or without us.”

“Can’t you talk to him?” Pidge asks miserably.

“I was trying,” Keith says, and catches his own tone. He says, more evenly, “I’ll keep trying. But we can’t let him do anything crazy. Stay, Pidge. Please. If you guys can. We’ll do some mind sharing and figure out this memory thing for him, and he’ll forget about -“ 

He can’t find the words. 

“He can hear us,” Lance says.

“I know,” Keith snaps. 

“Let’s get some rest,” Hunk says. 

 

 

-

 

 

Part of Keith is expecting to step into his old room just as he left it: the scant memorabilia he’d picked up on the first year of their war, the weapons he’d hidden in strategic places. A photo of he and Shiro that he’d managed to accidentally take to space with them, taken on Keith’s 16th birthday and forgotten in the rush to evacuate. But it’s just a room, same as any of the Castle rooms that had been left empty when Keith had been a Paladin. The sheets are neatly folded. There are fresh towels in the bathroom. There’s an extra blanket sitting on top of the bed, as if Coran knew who would take this particular room.

He whistles softly, and the wolf appears in a puff of displaced air, sending glittery dust swirling through the room. He jumps up onto the bed next to Keith, and drops his heavy head onto Keith’s shoulder. “Hey buddy,” Keith says, and gives him an ear scratch. “You find someone to feed you okay?” 

He gets a heavy sigh in return, but the wolf’s breath sure smells like someone’s fed him, so Keith leaves it alone. 

He’s exhausted. His body aches all over. He’s been tense for hours. Since Coran’s call, really. His hands are shaking with the afterimage of adrenaline. Usually, he’d give Lance a call and see if they could make each other laugh. Or he’d take a shower and masturbate, pin his hopes on slipping to sleep on the other edge of orgasm. He should try to sleep anyway. 

He checks his data pad for messages. Nothing from Kolivan or Biekie. He hesitates, and then taps out a message to his mom, using the Blades’ encryption codes from the war. It’s nothing serious. Nothing even warranting the old codes, except for the ache in his heart that wants to be soothed. A short message that he only has the courage for because he already knows the answer to it, because he’s already asked her. Just a few words, because he needs to hear her say yes again.

_ Would you love me no matter what? Even if I’ve done something terrible? _

He stares at the sent message for a long time. Finally he sighs, and puts the data pad away. She has a different mission; she won’t answer for days at least. “All right,” he says to his empty room. “I’ll watch it. Put it on.”

A screen flickers to life above the bed. The temperature in the room is absolutely perfect.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

Keith wakes slowly.

The wolf’s reassuring bulk is pressed up against his spine. He knows he’s safe. He’s warm under the extra blanket that Coran left, and the bed is softer than he remembers it being. He’d missed the little alcoves that they’d slept in, on the Castle of Lions; he’d liked the closed-in feeling of it, safe and secure with three walls close around him as he slept. It had worked like a trick: for once, he hadn’t had one of those dreams. He’d slept the whole night through. He doesn’t want to wake up. He doesn’t want to get out of bed. His whole body feels heavy and warm.

Keith opens his eyes, and finds that his bedroom has gone strange.

The ceiling has been sucked up into a dense spiral, arching high enough above his head that parts of it are lost to shadow. The storage boxes and desk are halfway up the wall. The emergency arrows don’t point towards the doors anymore, but are patterned randomly around the floor. His toothbrush and comb are floating around the room. His duffle bag is stuck in a corner of the ceiling, like a lost balloon. His shirt is still crumpled at the bottom of the bed where he left it. When he sucks in a long breath, the air smells like cedar and rain.

The warm feelings vanish as he remembers the night before - Shiro’s accusations; the proof he’d insisted Keith see; the technicolor glory of shifted Alteans acting out a story that bore so little resemblance to Keith’s that it was more confusing than anything else - and leave behind an emptiness so complete that he feels full again. 

He brushes his teeth in zero gravity, chasing beads of water from the tap, and when he steps out of the bathroom his bare feet slam back onto the ground.

Outside his room, the Castle looks normal. It smells normal. The lights stay off as he walks along the dim halls towards the kitchen. He fixes a mug of Qhulxian tea and a pot of coffee for himself and whoever next stumbles into the kitchen, which will probably be Hunk. 

He’s drifting a little. His body remembers the kitchen better than he would have thought, where everything lived in its blank cupboards. He remembers when this kitchen meant seven bodies (twelve, if you counted the mice and Kalternecker) in a vast space. Keith used to wake up hours before everyone else back then too, and he’d always fix a pot of whatever tea or coffee-like substance was around for the others to enjoy, because even if he’d felt awkward and sore and uncomfortable around these strange new people, he’d wanted them to know he was _trying_.

So he startles badly when a strange voice calls his name.

“Keith! How wonderful to see you!”

There’s an Altean standing in the doorway, gleaming in his freshly pressed white and pink Council robes. It takes a moment for Keith to place him, before _Elennoh_ slots into his brain like someone put it there. Elennoh was one of the Communications Ministers. 

“I do hope you’ll excuse the early hour,” Elennoh says, coming forward for a fairly natural feeling handshake. He must’ve been working on it since the last time Keith saw him. “My schedule has been monstrous since the release of our new show, but as soon as I heard you and the other Paladins were aboard the _Atlas_ , I just had to come up and say hello.”

“Do you uh, do you want some coffee?” is all Keith can think to say. He turns to get a cup down before Elennoh can answer, his heart pounding. Barely seven vargas after Shiro practically declares his intention to fight an empire just as big as the one Zarkon built, and the Council’s already on their doorstep? The big, Earth-style fridge is humming too loudly for Keith to tell if Shiro’s listening in, if he’s aware of Elennoh’s presence on his ship.

He hands the full cup to Elennoh with a flat, “There’s milk in the fridge. If you’re looking for Shiro, I haven’t seen him yet.” 

Nothing happens when Keith says Shiro’s name: no change in the lights or the temperature or the ambient humming. 

“Oh, I’m here for you,” Elennoh says easily, even though his mouth twisted at the mention of _milk_. “We already have Shiro, any time we want him.” 

“Mm,” Keith says, and sips his coffee. It was worth a shot, he thinks. “Okay, I should -“

“I know better than to ask why you’re here,” Elennoh says, and rolls his eyes at himself. “I’m sure it’s terribly important Paladin business. But - if you have time - maybe you’d have a few minutes for an appearance on our next Coalition broadcast? I’m sure you’re quite busy but of course I have to ask. You understand.”

“I understand,” Keith says automatically. “Um. I’ll check with Coran, I don’t -”

“Wonderful,” Elennoh says. It’s a casual interruption, his eyes on the view screen of his wrist computer. “You know how the public adores you, Keith. They hang on to your _every_ heroic move.” He looks up at Keith, his gaze very steady.

“I’ll uh,” Keith says. “I’ll let you know.”

“You let me know your schedule, and I’ll make it happen!” He beams at Keith and sets the untouched coffee down on the counter, using one finger to diffidently push the mug away. He asks, his voice dripping with sympathy, “And how is Pidge holding up? My colleagues told me about the latest failure of her project. How many attempts is this?”

At least thirty, just going by the ones Keith knows about. Pidge has proven to be as dogged about resurrecting Matt’s stored consciousness as she had about finding him during the war. He hadn’t known about this one, but he says nothing, just sips his coffee. “My suspicion is that the files were corrupted,” Elennoh says. He shifts a little closer to Keith, like they’re sharing a secret. “I’m sure she would have accounted for that, and her brother was so terribly good with this type of technology, but with her, well, issues - we have dozens of memory experts down on New Altea if she ever -“ 

“Thanks,” Keith interrupts. It’s not nearly so smooth an interruption, “I’ll pass along the message.”

“I appreciate it,” Elennoh says, and smiles. “We only want the best for you Paladins. You’ve earned it.”

Keith finally escapes with a badly needed refill, which he drinks as he walks. His stomach is sour with caffeine, churning around all the food he barely touched last night. He turns his feet towards finding Shiro without really thinking about it, the need of him outweighing everything else twisting up his guts. The training room is the same as Keith last saw it, six decaphoebs ago. The Castle’s bridge is coated with shining dust. (It’s only for show, of course; the _Atlas_ ’ bridge is up towards the nose of the ship, and god only knew where Keith was now in relation.) But as Coran might say, he strikes ghonqeok on the third try.

He used to find Shiro on the observation deck pretty often. Shiro would call it brooding, with a self-deprecating laugh. But it was where he’d go when he was taking something hard, so Keith really should have thought to check there first. 

When the big doors open the first thing he sees are the familiar green bands of light that used to light up the ceiling and ring the window looking outside the ship. Here they just hang in an endless field of stars. The ground shimmers as he steps into the room, as if he was walking through a pool of water. The astral plane is an even better place to brood than an observation deck, Keith supposes. Shiro’s added a series of low steps since the Castle was destroyed and resurrected on the _Atlas_ , and he’s sitting down near the bottom of them, close to where the big window would be, if it still existed.

Keith hands him the tea when he looks up, and then sits down on the step above Shiro. _Oh_ , Shiro says, _this is my favorite kind_. He sounds surprised, as if he thinks Keith wouldn’t remember. Keith sips his coffee and watches dawn bloom across the dimming stars. The room feels more stable, more real than he would have expected, after the way he woke up. The only disturbance is the click of Shiro’s metal fingers against the step he’s sitting on, tapping out some sort of pattern, over and over. Otherwise, it’s quiet out here. Peaceful, even. After a few minutes, Keith’s ragged breathing starts to even out. 

He doesn’t think Elennoh is threatening them, exactly. If the Council already knew why Shiro had brought his old team back onto the _Atlas_ , there would have been a bigger welcoming committee than one unsettling Altean. But Keith knows a warning when he hears one.

He can tell Shiro is still angry. Can feel frustration boiling off the man, clogging up the air along with everything else they haven’t said to each other. Maybe Shiro already knows what Keith is going to say. Has calculated from the length of Keith’s hair how all of this will go.

The urge to touch him is overwhelming.

“You need to be careful,” he says instead. “We were boarded this morning.”

Shiro frowns, first in confusion and then in concentration. His tapping never pauses, independent from whatever else he’s doing. When he finds Elennoh - wherever he drifted off to - his eyes widen. Then he smiles. Keith’s stomach sinks. _So we’re on the right path_ , Shiro says, pleased.

“Or,” Keith says, “they clocked that the five of us were on all board and want to film a special episode of _Defender of the Universe_.”

It’s supposed to be a joke, but he’s not Lance: the words sink before they’re even out of his mouth. Shiro looks back over his shoulder, his eyes flickering over Keith from top to bottom. _You watched it last night,_ he says. _What did you think? Do you still think I’m crazy?_

It’s hard to meet Shiro’s eyes. Diplomacy has never been Keith’s strong suit. Not like it was for Allura and Shiro and Hunk. But he’s had years of practice of lying to people’s faces to get what he needs. Right now, what he needs is for Shiro to be safe. 

“I never thought you were crazy,” he says. “I just said we need to be careful. The Coalition is really powerful, Shiro. You know they are. We helped make them that way.”

_You hate it too_ , Shiro says. _Living under them like this_. 

Keith hates _this_. He doesn’t want Shiro to look at him and know things like that. He turns the mug around and around in his hands. “What’s the alternative?” he asks. “At least they’re not the Galra.”

_ I don’t think they’re much better. _

“Yeah, well,” Keith says. “I haven’t seen them suck dry an entire planet yet.”

_No_ , Shiro says, shifting to look at Keith. _Just starve, if they’re not up on their tax revenue._

Keith meets Shiro’s gaze. “We don’t have to take down the Coalition to change it. If you’ve got a problem with the way that things are run, then do something about it. Allura would have.”

The false dawn picks up the gray in Shiro’s eyes, turning them soft despite the harsh line of his mouth. When Keith says Allura’s name that line shivers and relents. _Keith_ , he says, hesitantly. _Keith, I -_

“We would need proof,” Keith says, plowing mercilessly over him. “This is our _lives_ , Shiro. It’s not just you and me. Lance and Hunk and Pidge all have real lives. Families, too. If you do anything, you’re putting them in danger.”

_I know,_ Shiro says. _Keith, I know._

Something touches around Keith’s ankle. He flinches, and flinches again a heartbeat later when he realizes that it’s Shiro, that Shiro’s touching him, that his natural hand is wrapped around Keith’s ankle, holding on. His metal hand tap tap tapping away still. For a second Keith feels sick, sure that this is just to - to check Keith’s socks or something, but the moment stretches on and on and still Shiro’s only looking at him. 

His fingers are separated from Keith’s skin by so little. It would be so easy for him to slip his fingertips up inside the loose cuff of Keith’s pants, to touch warm skin underneath. He doesn’t know what Shiro’s thinking. He can’t read the look on Shiro’s face. He knows for the moment that he’s won, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. 

He sets his cup down on the step. “C’mere,” he says. 

Shiro’s eyes widen - and then fix on the comb that Keith tugs out of his back pocket. Keith feels the release of his gaze like he’d been physically held by it. It’s hard not to sag with relief. Hard not to just throw himself those last few inches forward - but it’s been years since Keith has had that bone deep certainty that Shiro would catch him, if he did. (But god, he remembers how it felt.)

“We can’t go out to the others with that big knot on the back of your head,” Keith says. His voice is shaky, and he lets Shiro hear it. “C’mere, let me fix you up.”

Shiro’s lips part, starlight rippling around them in imitation of the sounds he can no longer give voice to. 

 

 

-

 

 

They settle in the common room, along the low wide couches. Keith’s feet find the ridges of the table that Coran would raise when they needed a surface to talk strategy, or to play Monsters & Mana. It’s Coran who passes out the headsets, and settles nearby without one. It makes sense - he hadn’t been there, not really - he’d been on a rebel ship rather than on the _Atlas_ with Shiro - but it plucks painfully at something in Keith’s heart. 

He can’t do anything about it though, so he turns away. Pulls the headset down over his skull, fiddling with the bit of his braid that gets stuck between the little spokes. Slowly, Hunk and Pidge follow his lead. 

“Palen-bol,” Hunk says, almost cheerfully.

“Don’t go rooting around in my head,” Pidge says abruptly. She’s got her hands cupped over the sensors above her ears. “I don’t want you guys rooting around in my head.”

_I won’t,_ Shiro promises.

“It’s okay,” Keith says. They’re not hooked in yet, their minds still separate, but he tries anyway to tell her, _thank you_. 

She stares at him, unimpressed. “Whatever,” she says. “Let’s get this over with.”

Lance is holding the headset cradled in his hands, staring down at it. He’s close enough for Keith to dig an elbow into his ribs so he does. “You okay?” he asks.

Lance grimaces. “Yeah,” he says, and echoes Pidge. “Let’s get this over with.”

 

.

.

.

 

Let there be light.

Aw, come on. It’s just a joke. _Lighten_ up a little.

 

The light is pure, burning white. It blots out the senses until they push, find the curves and angles of their own bodies underneath all that white. Bodies that have been battered and punished, muscles that are aching, armor hiding lacerations and bruises and the sticky leak of blood down their skins. 

 

Good. What else.

 

Heartbeats. Panic. What kind of panic? The slow kind. The sticky and leaking kind. From another corner of their consciousness: racing panic and fury so dark and red that for a second it almost blots out the light.

 

But what _else_. What can you hear? 

 

Roaring. It was a lion. It was the wind. It was someone screaming. They were calling my name -

 

Push past it. _Focus_. You were _there_. We all were. What do you remember?

 

It’s as if they’re creating the world anew, dividing light from darkness. It’s like staring into the sun until it’s bled everything else out of you. Faintly, they can hear the sound of waves crashing onto sand, blurring in from someone else’s memories, from some time before there was only light.

Slowly - slowly - through the white, the edges of color begin to form. Yes, I see her! She’s there. Pink. Pink and white. _Beautiful_. Strong. 

She’s - 

“This is our only chance to undo what was done! We can save all of existence. _This_ is your purpose.”

_ screaming - _

 

.

.

.

 

Keith snatches off his headset. Instead of spinning across the room it catches on his braid and yanks. The pain is swift and indignant, and sets off panic like fireworks, one after the other. Air tangles in his throat, clawing open his lungs. Get it loose, get it _loose_ and then finally it is, he’s free, and he goes lurching out of his seat with no goal, no strategy, just dumb animal fear to _flee_.

He gets four steps and falls to his knees, gagging. There’s a hand on his back and something shoved under his face, just in time to catch the loose bile that’s all he can bring up, just coffee and his own sour fear. 

He wants to push it away, but his limbs feel weak and uncontrollable. He’s outside of his own body, and it’s only as he’s gently pulled upright and tugged against a bony chest that he yanks himself back inside with a gasp. It hurts. His fingertips hurt. His face hurts. He doesn’t know that he’s gasping for air but he is, wet and ragged. 

“It’s okay,” comes a voice from far away, “I’ve got him. It’s okay. Shiro. I’ve got him.”

He concentrates on the voice. On the cramping numbness in his fingertips and feet. Pulls himself hand over hand until awareness settles in that he’s slumped over in the middle of the floor, being cradled in Lance’s arms, his wet face buried in Lance’s neck.

“Oh, there you are,” Lance says, when Keith stiffens instinctively. He sounds amused, but when Keith moves he moves along with him, like he could hide Keith from the rest of them with his skinny body.

_ Keith, are you okay? _

Shiro’s on his knees on the floor, like he’d slid off the couch and then no further, warned back by whatever was on Lance’s face. They lock eyes and Shiro slumps abruptly forward, his face creased with relief. His hair’s escaping the short braid Keith managed to corral it into and even like that - even in the state Keith’s in - he’s so beautiful and there’s nothing in the universe Keith wants as badly as to crawl on his hands and knees and curl up in Shiro’s arms.

Keith turns away. Presses his forehead into the sharp wing of Lance’s collarbone and then sits up. He lets Coran hand him a water pouch, and swishes the taste of bile out of his mouth. “I’m alright,” he says. Hunk and Pidge are still in their seats, looking as pale and sweaty as Keith feels. If he hadn’t been the first to break, one of the others probably would have anyway.

He looks at Lance, still sitting cross-legged next to Keith like he’s got nowhere better to be. “Thanks,” he says. 

Lance shakes his head. He doesn’t look at Keith. “Come on,” he says. 

“You need a minute?” Keith asks, low. Shiro hasn’t taken his eyes off the two of them the whole time. Lance just laughs.

“A minute won’t help me,” he says, and gets to his feet. 

_Keith_ , Shiro starts to say, as they take their seats again. 

Keith cuts him off, ruthless about it. “I’m ready to go again.” 

Shiro fights a smile, and settles for clapping a heavy hand onto Keith’s shoulder. _Good_ , he says. _That was powerful magic blocking us from the memory. But I know we can fight through. And I’m - glad you’re okay._

It’s on the tip of Keith’s tongue to tell him that there’s no magic, and there never was. That it’s all just science and forces bigger than they’ll ever be, more powerful than people like them can understand, much less beat. But he doesn’t. He shakes his head and says instead, “Let’s try somewhere else first. Before we go back to when, with Allura - it’s - we’re rusty. Okay?” 

He directs the last part at Pidge and Hunk and Lance. “Okay,” Hunk says quickly. “Let’s ease into it. Can’t run before you learn how to reform Voltron.”

“We’re not reforming Voltron,” Pidge says. “Voltron is gone.” 

“You know what I mean,” Hunk says, and gestures to the loose circle of them. “This.”

_Okay, Keith_ , Shiro says slowly. _When did you have in mind?_

 

.

.

.

 

_ What do we say?  _

Really? 

_ Clear Day! Clear Day! Clear Day! _

Really Keith?!

 

The music unspools like warm, sticky candy, heavy on the tongue. It mixes with the sawdust and ozone smell of Drazen, the clean smell of their big winds finally settled, just for a few hours. It wraps hazy around the flashing lights, which reminded her mostly of the movies Dad used to watch, men in trench coats walking lonely under sodium lamplight, a technology so archaic that it had felt as foreign as riding horseback. He was a little queasy maybe from the last skewer he’d eaten, something that looked like century eggs that left his tongue feeling furry. He couldn’t stop watching corners, all that clanging and yelling pressing a button in his head that means _danger_. He felt it too, but he was fine, he was determined, he knew this would be good for all of them, he knew he could get through this. He was lonely without her. He’s always lonely without her. He’ll listen for her voice forever.

_ What do we say? _

It wasn’t the last time they were together - they weren’t together, and all of their thoughts had wrapped around her absence even then: anyone playing the carnival games was playing them for her, anyone eating was thinking of what she might like, and Shiro made a whole catalog of observations to tell her about later -but they’d kept so few memories of safety, of excitement, of expectation. He hadn’t picked this one on purpose, had grabbed wildly in their shared subconscious, but why not. Why not Clear Day.

 

She’d been sick, remember? She hadn’t come because she’d been sick. But she wasn’t sick. She was depressed. She had an argument with Maeral and Thevu that day. That crazy Altean we captured had just died. Tavo. His name was Tavo.

I didn’t know he died.

She saves him. On _Defender_ , she saves him.

Why would they have changed that?

Who knows. They saved Matt too. 

Shut up.

 

The call of a yalmor cuts across their thoughts like a siren. 

 

“Where’s Shiro?” Keith asked. The question stains purple across the honey yellow air. Just dull curiosity from the others, dreaming over their own pre-occupations (Allura, Allura, Allura like a heartbeat). Coran frozen in triumph under the lights, beaming so hard they ache to remember it. Where’s Shiro. 

 

Did you forget what happened next?

No. But I don’t - how was I supposed to - they’re all - 

Leave him alone. At least he didn’t pick a memory about Voltron.

 

I’m sorry. 

_ What do we say? Clear Day, Clear Day! _

 

They found him just as the Alteans said: winning an arm wrestling contest. The candy sweet atmosphere of the fair turned sour with old sweat, inside the close tent. The other contestants a kaleidoscope of species known and unknown, Galra features scattered throughout like drops of ink into water. The tent had even smelled the same as the gladiator arena, like dirty sand and desperation, and the edges of the tent where the spotlight fails to reach looks just like it too, the shape of the other fighters lost to shadows and suppressed memories.

 

I’m sorry, Keith.

 

By the time the others had gotten there Shiro had taken down six contestants (and broken three of their fingers and one tentacle-like appendage). They’d stood in the crowd, swept up in the roaring and the shouting of all those dim figures. They’d screamed for Shiro to win. They’d screamed _Champion_. _Champion_. 

When he won, he slammed their hands down so hard that they’d nearly broken the table they were tied to, and then he screamed too. His spine contorted with it. Spittle coated their hands, still joined. Now, they hear it as a howl that rips through the five of them like wind - then it was the silent mockery of a scream, his voice locked up on the _Atlas_ like a princess in a tower.

They’d swept up the stage to him. Hoisted him up on their shoulders. Champion. Champion. Not noticing the way he’d stiffened when touched, the way his eyes had gone big and raw and then empty all the way through. He couldn’t ask who they were. Why they were touching him. He couldn’t say anything at all.

It wasn’t until Shiro tried to escape that Keith realized something was wrong. When they’d come out of the tent and back into the din of the cool, sweet smelling fair, he’d stood stiff and silent with the other Paladins while they distracted themselves over what to eat next. Hunk turned just in time to see Shiro slipping away, and when he called Shiro’s name, Shiro had gone still and compliant. 

“Shiro?” Keith had asked, and taken Shiro’s limp, clammy hand in his own. “Shiro, are you okay? Do you know where you are?” 

He accepted the touch, but his eyes stayed fixed to the middle distance, and he wouldn’t look Keith in the face.

So Keith had taken Shiro to the infirmary. He’d thought the Altean doctors could help. That they’d know what to do. Even then, after years of waking up under scalpels instead of in a pod, he’d trusted them to help.

Allura and Thevu had been there. They’d looked up when the door slid open, and Allura had looked right at Keith. Their eyes had met and held, even as Keith had moved past them, turning his head to hold the connection. “You okay?” he’d called, but then he hadn’t waited to hear her answer. He’d gotten Shiro settled on a bed, and - 

 

Wait - go back. Did you hear that?

Hear what?

 

It’s Lance who wrests control of the moment from Shiro’s sticky consciousness. It’s like fighting gravity, or trying to pause a movie from your seat in the theater. They used to run battle simulations this way, autopsy victories and losses this way. The headsets would share the moment as fully as their brains had been able to record and retain the information, even if their actual attention had been on whoever was shooting at them, or protecting the others. But then again it was always Shiro in the pilot’s seat, directing their focus. 

No - we were good at the other stuff too. We used to share. We had to share to form Voltron. It was always about being stronger together. We were always stronger together.

 

Allura and Thevu had already been in the infirmary when Keith and Shiro had come in. Allura on one of the other beds with her arms wrapped around her knees. Thevu close by, her posture one of absolutely perfect sympathy. Close up, they can see the tremors in Allura’s hands, the wrecked look in her eyes. All the things Keith had missed in his headlong dash past her. He wouldn’t find out about the dead flowers or the whip scars on her wall for weeks, and by then he wouldn’t remember seeing her in the infirmary at all. 

 

Lance draws them closer. Thevu’s voice had been so soft. It had been pitched not to carry.

 

“We have to stop her. You understand that, don’t you, Princess? Honerva’s power is too great. She could split this Coalition you’ve worked so hard to build. She’s already attracted sympathizers who feel that we’re too _soft_ on Galran collaborators. That has to come first.”

Allura shook her head. It was a fitful sort of movement. A bead of sweat rolled from her hairline and down the back of her collar. “The distress calls continue,” she said. “There’s still a chance to pull our fighters from Senfama and come to their aid. Senfama can fend off any Galra attack with the Zaiforge cannon, but Siiz -”

“Siiz is lost, princess.”

“It is not lost,” Allura said indignantly. “Nothing is ever lost, as long as there is life.”

“Of course,” Thevu soothed, and laid a hand over her wrist. “Of course, Princess. Preservation of life is the Coalition’s highest priority. We’re not _abandoning_ them - the rebels will evacuate those they can. But we cannot bring peace and stability to the galaxy while Honerva is allowed to seek power. And for that - we depend on you. Only _you_ can save us.”

“Honerva is the highest threat,” Allura said, as if it were a question. The words are rote. The defensive flash from a moment before was gone. She laid her head back down on her knees. Her eyes tracked motion across the infirmary, watching and making sure that her Paladins were all right. “But there’s nothing I can do to counter her abilities.”

“You’re mistaken,” Thevu told her. “The energy is inside you. Everything you need is within your grasp. We just have to be strong enough to use it.”

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

New Altea is a far cry from Xaex, or any of the other planets Keith has spent the last few decaphoebs on. The air smells of fresh water and juniberries. The buildings are tall and proud, and graced with enormous terraces and windows that allow the cool breeze to wander into their richly decorated rooms. The streets are wide and clean, the sidewalks scattered withpromenading citizens enjoying the bright, warm day. The faces they pass - almost all Altean - look carefree and well-fed. You’d never know there’d been a war at all, much less that they’d fought long enough to win it.

Pidge and Lance are a lot more blasé about the grandiosity of the capital than Keith is, even though Lance lives more than a varga’s ride from the city center, close to Allura’s memorial, and Pidge still lives with her parents back on Earth. For five decaphoebs, as soon as Keith has arrived on New Altea he’d done his best to leave as quickly as possible, and Pidge and Lance aren’t quite as allergic to the peaceful atmosphere. But he’d woken up feeling even more allergic to the _Atlas_ , so when Pidge had said she was going planetside for some supplies, he’d offered to come along. At least this morning he’d opened his eyes in a room-shaped room.

He’d asked Hunk if he’d wanted to come along, but Hunk had let out a groan that lasted at least forty solid ticks and then said, “When I hung up my chef’s coat I swore I’d never set foot on New Altea again and I’m not going back on that - not for Shiro and not for you.”

He just doesn’t remember the capital being like this. It looks like something out of a dream. It looks the way Keith used to imagine Altea had looked when Allura described it, ten thousand years before the rest of them were born: like a fantasy spun by a princess. He can’t imagine the kind of money it takes to build a city like this, much less _sustain_ it. 

“Changed a lot, huh?” Lance asks. He’s grinning openly, watching Keith try to tuck his eyeballs back in his head. Everyone’s _staring_ at them, and he doesn’t seem bothered by that either.

“Is it like this now where you live?” Keith asks. They’re walking towards an enormous plaza, which is where all of the really impressive buildings live: the Temple of Alchemical Study, the Ministries of Culture, Science, Art, Peacekeeping, Governance, whatever other monuments the Council has built for themselves lately. An enormous statue, ringed by five smaller figures, sits in the center of the plaza. As they draw closer its features resolve themselves into detail: it’s Voltron. Of course. Why would it be anything else.

Pidge snorts. “Nowhere else looks like this,” she says. She’s a few steps ahead of them. Her fingers are snagged into the wolf’s fur, who after so many decaphoebes of being part of Keith’s family, is used to this kind of treatment. It’s for the best; there are flocks covering the plaza, of what Keith assumes are the Altean equivalent of pigeons, and the wolf’s ears have been swiveling like satellite dishes to follow the fluttering movements. They probably look pretty tasty to a wolf. They look kind of tasty to Keith too. He feels like Hunk has fed them something pretty similar a few times.

“It feels kind of empty,” he says, and the others shrug.

“Well yeah,” Pidge says. “There’s not _that_ many Alteans.”

“Yeah, but,” Keith says, and gestures to the city around them. They passed through quiet, leafy residential streets and dense apartment buildings on their way into the city center. “What about everyone else? The Coalition is thousands of planets, doesn’t anyone else get to live in the capital? Is it really just embassies and ministries? I thought we were resettling refugees in this quadrant.”

“Uhhmm,” Lance says. “Yeah, I think there’s been a couple of groups that showed up, last decaphoeb.”

“Really?” Keith asks. He looks around reflexively. “Where are the settlements? Can we go out and see them?”

“I don’t know,” Lance says, and shrugs. “I don’t think they get to stay.” When Keith and Pidge don’t say anything to that, he adds, “Hey, my town is pretty normal looking. You should come visit while you’re here. Marco and I’ve been fixing up the outbuildings behind the big field, you remember? We’ve got a pretty nice guest house now.”

“We have to get back to Xaex as soon as possible,” Keith says, and then feels bad. “We’ll try and come once that’s uh, better, though.”

“Why don’t you guys just go back now?” Pidge asks. She twists over her shoulder to look at Keith. It could be the sun that’s making her glare like that. He knows she’s not mad at him, at least. Probably.

“I can’t,” Keith says uncomfortably. A group of aliens - they look like Yinthyra, but he definitely remembers offending the Yaxthyrian ambassador by assuming - burst into giggles as the four of them pass. How does anyone get used to being watched like this?

“Go easy on him, Pidge,” Lance tells her. “It’s Shiro.”

“Hmph,” Pidge says. “I guess if you think Shiro really needs _help_. He seems fine to me.”

“He wants to topple the government because they put out a bad TV show,” Lance says.

“He wants to topple the government because he thinks probability trees are the solution to all problems,” says Pidge, with all the natural disdain of a programmer.

“I think he’s got a lot of reasons,” says Keith softly, looking around at the sparkling plaza. “But he does seem a lot more, uhm, coherent.”

Naturally they draw close to the statue, and stop to stare up at it. It’s actually a fountain, and the five Paladins are knee deep in the water, posed as if ready for battle. It could be the same positions they used to finish up the _Voltron Live Show_ with, but it looks like this version actually features Keith, and not Allura-as-Keith. 

Standing in Voltron’s shadow, the air is abruptly much colder. The splash and patter of the water mutes the sound of the birds, the voices and footsteps that echo through the open space. “Keith,” Lance says, so quietly that they both have to lean in to hear. “You work for the Council. What do you really think?”

“I don’t,” Keith says, flustered, “I don’t work for the Council, the Marmora are an independent -”

“No one’s independent,” Pidge says, tucking her chin into her chest. “Not even the Legendary Defender project. The Council has been up our asses since we were in the planning stage, even though they think it’s just a - just a -” She frowns, groping for the words. 

“A passion project,” Lance supplies, and she shrugs. 

“It’s just for Earth,” she says. “They tell my dad they have the _Atlas_ , there’s five Castle ships, there are Coalition member armies - there’s Balmeran colonies all over the place, why worry about anything else.”

Lance tucks his hands into his pockets and gives Keith a sidelong glance. “You do work for them though. More than the rest of us, at least. You and Shiro and Kolivan are the ones they still put on camera.”

“Not if I can help it,” Keith snarls. 

“But do you think Shiro could be right?” Lance asks. “Is there any chance she’s - that she could be -”

“That conversation we saw with Thevu was weird,” Pidge says thoughtfully. She wraps her arms around the wolf, leaning most of her weight on him. He bears it stoically. “What was she talking about, an energy inside of Allura? I mean, Allura was really powerful but we defeated Haggar using weapons and Voltron and the _Atlas_ , not Altean magic. I think. I mean we still don’t remember how it happened, but when we woke up they said it was Voltron who defeated her. They said we all had a hand in it. Right? And anyway, I feel like we would know if Allura had been kidnapped or something. If anyone would know, _we_ would know. Right? Where would the Council even _keep_ her?”

“There’s always Oriande,” Lance muses. “It’s still off limits to anyone but pure - excuse me - _worthy_ Alteans.”

“I did think it was weird that they showed Haggar killing the White Lion, on _Defender of the Universe_ ,” Pidge says. “I mean, the White Lion is still alive, if you can call a mythical creature made out of pure energy beyond our -” 

She stops, and grits out a noise of sheer frustration between her teeth. “Beyond our current scientific understanding?” Keith asks.

“ _Yes_ ,” she says. “ _Obviously_.”

Keith shivers. A wet nose nudges at his palm, and he strokes one hand over the wolf’s muzzle reflexively. He’s staring into the fountain, held fast by the shivery light bouncing off the water and up into the faces of those marble Paladins. His lips shape the words that have been at the edge of his tongue almost since he set foot on the _Atlas_ , but he can’t hear himself over the crash of water.

 

 

-

 

 

The turning point - in their lives and in the war - was the quintessence field.

Keith doesn’t really remember what it was like on the other side of reality. He remembers light like snowfall. He remembers feeling invincible, like the first time he drove his hoverbike straight off a cliff, laughing his head off even as Shiro’s dust coated his tongue. He remembers being filled with light, and filled also with the essence of his friends - the distance they kept from each other while piloting Voltron bleeding apart under all that raw life. He felt Allura’s panic, her certainty that they needed to get out. He felt fury, curiosity, righteousness from Hunk, Lance, and Pidge. He felt Shiro’s soul, still interwoven in Black’s, entwining itself with his own. 

And then he felt nothing. 

They’d turned to go after Lotor. They just couldn’t leave him to die there in all that light. He remembers seeing Voltron’s fingers grasping after the disappearing shape of the _Sincline_ , and then - nothing. They sank into the light, tumbling endlessly end over end, dissolving. There hadn’t been any time to feel afraid, or to feel regret. 

He’s never been sure whether they all died in the quintessence field. If they’d been blasted to nothing the way Shiro had been, wresting control of Black from Zarkon. It’s one of the only true blank spots in his memory, and he’s never had the guts to ask Shiro what it had felt like when he died. Any of the times he died.

But when he’d woken up - 

 

 

.

.

.

 

 

“Look! She’s coming to. Oh, thank the Lion.”

“Easy now. They’ve all been through so much.”

The feeling of a body being lifted and settled upright against comfortable pillows. The cool rim of a glass pressed to her lips. Warm all over, safe, tucked in. Soft voices all around. Gentle hands that smooth his hair away from his face. They’d woken separately, one by one, but the memories bleed into sensation, sticky and inseparable from each other. 

The first thing each of them had done was to cry for the others. 

The second was to stare, struck absolutely silent, at the circle of smiling Altean faces that surrounded them.

 

Pidge had been the first to wake, the first to see those smiling Alteans, and the first to learn that she was six months older than she’d been when she went into the quintessence field. She was two centimeters taller. Four pounds lighter. 

Throughout the calm, kind explanation that the Altean doctor had given her, Coran had sat next to her with an arm around her shoulders, and his other hand holding both of hers. They’d been lost in the quintessence field for three days as Coran watched tiny tears in reality grow bigger and bigger, not knowing what else to do except stand vigil with his empty Castle, and Shiro’s empty body in a pod in the med bay.

“I never lost hope,” Coran vowed to Pidge - the same vow he’s made to all of them, over and over again.

The quintessence had made them very sick. Very, very sick. Their bodies had needed to rest. The words shiver and merge with the more complex explanations given later on to Shiro and Allura. _Induced coma. Alchemical intervention. Exposure level twice of what was recorded for Zarkon and Honvera. Survival was a miracle. Survival was inexplicable._

And a particular image not told to any of them, but overheard by Lance only a few weeks before Allura’s death: _When they were pulled from the quintessence field, it looked like their bodies were leaking starlight._

These things they all know, but the moment they find themselves in is silent. Just Pidge, by herself. The last few minutes before everything would change, although she didn’t know that yet. Alone for the first time since she woke up almost two full quintants before - not literally alone, of course, but alone in a room full of her sleeping friends, who are not really sleeping.

She felt very weak. It took forever to shuffle from bed to bed, but she’d slept for six months and that was enough rest for a long time. She made faces into Hunk’s face. _How young we all look._ She tapped Lance on the nose, on the sharp edges of his cheekbones, and twice on his forehead. She did the same to Shiro on the glass outside of the pod he was entombed in, caught at the edge of another false death. _Pay attention. There’s so many details we missed._ She lingered at Shiro’s side for a while, combing carefully through his vitals and the pod’s records. She wiggled each one of Keith’s toes. And then she went and sat at Allura’s feet, pulling her knees up against her chest and wrapping her arms around them.

Loneliness pulses like waves. Sadness and fear and worry. The depth of it is unsurprising, and it sweeps through them, threatening to drag them under. It’s not from _then_ , when mostly what Pidge felt was bewildered and tired and bored of waiting for the rest of them to wake up. It’s the anticipation of grief. It colors every memory she has.

They cluster close to the Pidge on the bed, the Pidge of _then_. The softness of their memories doesn’t hide how thin and raw they all look, less gently asleep than mostly dead. Every detail is in sharp focus, noted and catalogued and dismissed by Pidge’s quick mind. Back then, she paid attention to everything. Could pay attention to everything.

So she saw immediately as Allura started to stir. She went tense and quivering all over. She shouted for Coran. 

Lost in Pidge’s memory, the five of them _now_ drink in every shift of Allura’s expressions as she hauls herself slowly up towards the world. 

“Allura,” Pidge cried, and cried more when Allura’s arms came up around her, giving comfort even as she asked, muzzy with exhaustion, “Pidge? Is that you? What’s happened? Is everyone all right?”

“So much happened,” Pidge said, “Allura, Alteans saved us.”

“What?” Allura pulled back to study Pidge’s face. “But Altea is -”

“It’s not,” Pidge told her, and they slip under the waves watching that first uncertain hope dawn across Allura’s face. 

The door burst open, revealing a frantic Coran followed closely by the doctors who had cared for Pidge over the last quintants, who had cared for them all over the last phoebs. “Alteans,” Allura said as she saw them, her voice throbbing, “Coran! Oh, Coran!”

Coran crashed into them. He swept Allura up in his arms and they clung to each other. Pidge had flinched out of the way and for just a moment was forgotten entirely by her friends, the scope of their grief and joy unimaginable. Then Allura drew her in as well, sharing the weight and the relief. 

The Alteans were quiet throughout this. They stood at a respectful distance, their expressions solemn and understanding. 

After a few minutes, Allura wiped her face and smoothed her hair back. She looked around the room, taking in the sight of the others in their beds, Shiro in his pod.

“Everyone is fine,” one of the Alteans said. “The rest of your Paladins should wake up soon.”

Allura looked to Coran for confirmation and received it. “Thank you,” she said, looking back to her people, assembled around her bed like a throne. “I’m so glad to hear it. It seems that a lot has happened. Please - tell me where you’ve come from.”

One of the Altean doctors moved forward, and took Allura’s hand. Her smile was so gentle. It reminded Pidge of her mother’s smile. “My name is Petrulius, Princess Allura,” the doctor says. “And we come from a planet where there are thousands of Alteans.” 

“Thousands,” Allura gasped softly. She stared up at Petrulius with wide eyes. Her other hand is locked around Coran‘s arm, and his hand on top of hers. Pidge watched silently. 

“Thousands,” another Altean agreed. He wasn’t a doctor, but one of the Sacred Alteans that had saved all of their lives. Pidge hadn’t known his name then, but it was Maeral. “We have lived there since the war with Zarkon began. Lotor saved us from destruction. Many thousands of Alteans were off-world when our planet was destroyed, for trading expeditions or war games or scientific exploration. For decaphoebs, Lotor traveled the universe, hiding the survivors on a planet beyond a quantum abyss.”

“Lotor,” Pidge hissed, and looked around as if she’d missed him, as if he were stashed under someone else’s bed.

Maeral shook his head. “We were too late to save him.”

The regret in his voice was real. The sorrow was real. They’ve never had cause to doubt otherwise. Not at that moment, and not since.

 

Does it matter though? They’re zealots. They treated Lotor like a god. The only reason the capital isn’t full of statues to him is they think the optics aren’t good. 

Not as good as Voltron, at least.

This doesn’t make sense. We must be missing something. 

Missing what? We already know the history of the Colony. Shiro, you’ve had access to their historical records for six years. Lotor wanted to preserve life. So does the rest of the Council. That’s the whole reason they didn’t side with Haggar. 

 

Petrulius, likewise, was affected. She took up the tale as Maeral wiped his eyes. “Thanks to Lotor, we were able to preserve our customs and traditions, and grow our alchemical knowledge safe from the clutches of Zarkon’s greed. We’ve thrived for thousands of years.”

Allura opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. The memory is so clear for Pidge. Clear enough that Allura’s tears glisten like diamonds in the warm light of the med bay, trembling down her cheeks. “I’m sorry,” Allura said. She wiped mechanically at her face, but it didn’t help, and the tears kept coming. It was unnerving to Pidge, and her anxiety tints the scene with a queasy yellow. She hadn’t liked seeing Allura cry. Didn’t like seeing anyone cry, when it came down to it, but seeing Allura cry was like seeing her dad or mom cry, or Shiro, or Matt. 

She reached out and tucked her fingers around the curve of Allura’s knee, under the blanket, but Allura didn’t seem to notice. “I’m so sorry,” Allura said again. “I don’t mean to be so - this is just - it’s quite emotional. We thought that we were the last, and - I never dared to hope.”

“Couldn’t believe it myself when they came out of the wormhole,” Coran said softly. 

 

Yeah, just at the perfect moment to swoop in and play heroes. And only because Haggar told them where Lotor and Voltron had gone missing. 

How is that proof that they’re evil? What, did you think if we went back far enough we’d catch Petrulius in a big old villain monologue? They picked a side in a war. Just like we did.

No, we were -

 

“I thought that I’d lost you,” Coran said, and laughed tonelessly. He sounds like he’s speaking at a distance. “Was about to shut myself up in one of those pods and sleep for another ten thousand years. But it’s all okay now, isn’t it?”

It would be okay. When Coran said it, Pidge had believed it. With only two Alteans, they’d splintered a ten thousand year old dictatorship, freed hundreds of planets from Galran rule, and brought hope to the universe. With thousands of Alteans, they’d win. They’d _win_.

“Princess Allura,” Maeral said, “while you were indisposed, we were able to establish contact with the Blades of Marmora and your Coalition, and have continued the fight against the Galra in Voltron’s name.”

 

The war’s _over_ , Shiro. We _won_. It doesn’t look like Allura thought it was going to, but she was just a kid like we all were. She thought the Coalition was the answer but there _isn’t_ an answer. 

Whoever’s in power will do anything to stay there. 

And we’ve seen how much worse it could be without -

All these planets, they’ve been enslaved just like the Galra, only this time there’s a prettier bow on it and a mythical savior! How could you not stand up -

This is what Voltron is now. A symbol of _peace_ and _freedom_.

We can’t take them on again. They’re too powerful.

We didn’t let that stop us before. We took on the Galra Empire because we knew it was wrong. Allura knew -

Oh, don’t lie, Shiro! This isn’t about Allura at all. I think it’s about you and your ego. You’re stuck on this ship and you want to matter again -

 

The room pulses with white light, and abruptly five voices go silent. In Pidge’s memory Maeral’s voice skips and shudders and he says again, “continued the fight in - continued - Voltron’s name -” 

Light shivers across Maeral’s face like he’s underwater, that strange white oozing into the queasy yellow, filling the whole room with an iron stink. Keith feels sick to look at it - just him, disassociated so quickly from the others that it’s bizarre to be feeling only his own feelings again, the others’ voices a confused shout as the memory flickers and cracks.

What’s happening? 

Pidge! 

He’s conscious of his own body, sitting on the low couches in Shiro’s fake Castle, sitting at the memory of Hunk’s feet on the bed next to Allura’s, the ache in his muscles, the spit gathering in the back of his throat as that metal taste fills his mouth, the edges of the others’ minds brushing up against his own. 

And then Allura stiffens. She turns, blood pouring abruptly, incongruently out of her mouth and dripping down her chin -and looks Keith directly in the face.

 

 

.

.

.

 

 

The link goes abruptly black, and for a brief moment all that Keith feels is blessed, blissful relief. He’s alone in his own head, which is dark and cool and completely silent. And then - 

“Oh my god - Pidge!” 

He opens his eyes to a flurry of motion, Lance and Hunk on their feet, Pidge rigid on the couch next to him, Shiro peeling off her headset and her glasses, everyone talking at once.

Keith swallows. His body is cold all over. He’s panting, pressed back against the cushions like he could run away from his own mind. 

_ Back up! Give us some room. _

“Another one?” Hunk asks. His voice sounds strange and wavery, like Keith is hearing him from another room, and it takes a moment to realize that the problem is him, that he can barely hear anything over the roar of his panicked heartbeat. “It’s been so long since she had a seizure, I thought -”

Shiro barely glances up. _I’ve already called Coran_ , he says. _Don’t worry, it’s not serious, it’s only_ \- he gestures to his own temple with one hand, the other gently laying Pidge on her side and pulling her limbs straight. _It’ll be over in a minute or so._

“Did you scan her brain?” Hunk asks. His hair hangs loose in his face, bunched around the arms of the headset. “Shiro, she said she didn’t want you doing stuff like that.”

Shiro’s eyes cut sideways towards Hunk, and then back down at Pidge. _I had to make sure she was okay_ , Shiro says. He’s not doing much - just a gentle hand on her shoulder, keeping her mostly in place - but there’s not much to do, when something like this happens. He’s tucked the ear of her glasses into the collar of his shirt. Sweat is pouring down Pidge’s face, dampening her collar. Her eyes are open. Her lips make strange smacking sounds, like she’s swallowing water. She’s looking right at Keith.

Lance flops back down on the couch. “For a second I thought Shiro was right,” he says, and laughs shakily. “That the Council really did mess with our memories.”

For once, Shiro says nothing. Keith pulls his headset off. He feels as sweaty as Pidge looks. Strands of hair are sticking to his temples. The tail of his braid has gone askew and he pulls the tie out robotically, combing his fingers through his hair to unwind it. True to prognosis, Pidge has already stopped shaking and smacking her lips. Keith hasn’t seen her go through it since the war ended. The first year after the crash and her head injury, the seizures had come almost daily, leaving her disoriented and exhausted for hours after. He’d thought they were getting better, too. He never asked, but he’d thought Pidge was getting better.

_Hey_ , Shiro says softly, as Pidge squeezes her eyes closed. A pained whimper escapes her throat. Lance shifts forward in his seat, resting his elbows on his knees. _Hey, you’re okay. It’s just us._

“Shiro?” she slurs, and then bursts into tears. “Shiro!” 

She slings her arms around Shiro’s neck and clings, monkey-like. The look of shock on his face would be hilarious under better circumstances. Hesitantly, he hugs her back. Over Pidge’s shoulder, he meets Keith’s gaze, and then his eyes slip closed. Pidge’s shoulders shake, her face buried in Shiro’s chest. She’s always looked way more delicate than she actually is, especially compared to Shiro’s bulk, but like this - 

Keith looks away. 

His eyes find Hunk, who’s turning his headset around in his hands, looking troubled. Pidge’s choking sobs fill up the room, leaving no space for Keith to speak. But he wouldn’t know what to say, even if he could.

“Well, that felt like another bust,” Lance announces. His shoulders are tight around his ears, but his tone is breezy. It’s funny, Keith think. Lance used to cry so easily, without shame, but he’s hung up on Keith probably dozens of times in the last few years rather than let anyone see him do it. 

It’s not easy on any of them, staring these memories in the face. Seeing Allura again. Seeing how easily they were duped by promises of peace. The war had gotten so ugly after that. Voltron had mustered a Coalition and began a rebellion; the Altean Council mustered thousands of armies, and the body count had been accordingly high. He hadn’t loved Allura the way Lance had, but he’d loved her and it feels like Shiro’s taken a knife to the murky bottom of his emotions, stirring up all that mud and pain. It had been a lot easier to just let it all lie, keep his head down and do his work and not think about what else the Coalition did, about what happens sometimes under the cover of the Marmora’s humanitarian missions.

Pidge gasps, an abrupt and painful suck of air, and shoves Shiro away. It’s not enough to push him over - even now Shiro has at least a hundred pounds on her - but she’d pulled him down in a bad angle and he rocks awkwardly back on his heels.

No one says anything. The moment stretches thin and then snaps when Pidge reaches forward and snatches her glasses back from where they’re hooked over Shiro’s collar. She pushes him again, this time out of the way - but when she tries to stand up she just falls back onto the couch.

Hunk catches Keith’s eye and nods. Keith nods back, and Hunk heavens himself up with a sigh. “I gotcha, buddy,” he says, and offers an arm down for Pidge to take. On his knees, Shiro shuffles out of their way. 

Lance looks questioningly at Keith, and then stands as well. “Guess I’ll,” he drawls, and follows Pidge and Hunk out of the room without finishing the thought. 

The door closes behind them, and Keith is alone with Shiro. Shiro’s staring at nothing, his eyes flickering back and forth. Had he done something, to change the memory? To make Allura look at Keith like that, as if she could see him? It felt too close to those dreams he has.

“Shiro,” he says. “You okay?”

Shiro doesn’t say anything, but his gaze stills and focuses. Still in there, then. He really is doing better. “Shiro, did you,” Keith says, but he can’t ask. Shiro doesn’t trick people. He lays out his expectations and what he plans to do, and it’s up to you to keep up or fall behind. It was just a memory, and it can’t harm Keith any more than any other memory he’s got locked up in his head.

Instead, he scoots sideways on the couch and lays a hand on Shiro’s shoulder. It twitches a little under his fingers. After a moment, Shiro turns his face up towards Keith. _I’m fine, Keith. You?_

It’s a dumb question, so Keith ignores it. “Pidge didn’t mean all of that,” Keith tells him.

_ Maybe she’s right, though. Maybe it is just my ego. _

Maybe. Maybe Pidge is right. Shiro’s never been sidelined before, never been treated as anything but special at any point in his life. But it feels unkind to say so, and it’s hard to think of a good answer anyway when Shiro’s looking at him so intently, with that strange expression on his face. He’s looked like that since Keith got here. Conflicted. Sad. Open to being talked out of doing something stupid, maybe.

_Allura would never have let things get this bad_ , Shiro says bitterly. _I’m failing all of you, every day I just **sit here** in this stupid ship, **useless** \- _

“Allura did let it happen,” Keith interrupts, even though the guilt spears him right through to say it. “The other Alteans took control of the Coalition and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Shiro, this is bigger than us. Voltron didn’t win the war. _They_ did.”

That shuts Shiro up for a moment. He turns away - but not far enough that Keith’s hand would fall from his shoulder. He’s wearing an Earth-style shirt, thin enough that Keith can feel his body heat through the cloth. He squeezes Shiro’s shoulder. It’s an accident - some stupid muscle memory - that makes him rub his thumb along the ridge of Shiro’s spine afterwards.

“You’re not wrong about the Council,” Keith says softly. “They did terrible things during the war to gain power, and they’re still doing it. All in the name of peace and stability. This, this _Legendary Defender_ shit, they’re using Allura to do it. I’d be angry too.”

_But you’re not,_ Shiro says. 

“Sometimes I am,” Keith says. 

Shiro twists to look at him. _What about the other times?_

Keith takes his hand back, tucks it up against his side. Shiro follows the motion of it, twisting around and up onto his knees, his hands coming up as if they’ll wrap around Keith’s thighs - and then he lets them fall. Eases back on his heels while Keith tries to catch his breath.

The answer is scared. Keith is scared. It turns out there’s a lot to be afraid of in life, and sometimes it’s seeing a whole bunch of people get executed right in front of you. Sometimes it’s the decimation of an entire planet. Sometimes it’s refugee camps that stretch as far as the eye can see. Sometimes it’s almost being touched by the man he’s loved harder than anyone else in the universe. His brain isn’t too great at telling what’s a threat these days.

_Maybe I’m right about the Council,_ Shiro asks, _but do you think I’m wrong about the rest of it? Tell me the truth, Keith._

“I don’t know,” Keith whispers. He shifts in his seat, his spine curling protectively. “She’s dead, Shiro. She has to be. It’s been five years. How could we not know?"

Shiro shakes his head. _It’s the only thing that makes sense,_ he says. Keith shudders, anticipating an explanation about timelines and probabilities, but what Shiro says instead is, _She doesn’t give up._

Keith reaches out. His palm skims along the high angle of Shiro’s cheekbone. His fingertips curl around the edge of his jaw. The room shakes at the edge of his vision as Shiro shivers, full body, at the lightest of touches. “I’m trying to stop you,” Keith says hoarsely, because Shiro asked for the truth and it’s beyond Keith’s strength not to give it to him. 

Shiro smiles. _I know,_ he says, and turns his face into Keith’s hand, pressing a kiss into his palm. _You don’t give up either._

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

 

It’s no use - he can’t sleep.

Keith has been tossing and turning for hours. He’d left Shiro and wandered the _Atlas_ until he found a gym. He didn’t try and track down the others, though he sent a message to Hunk to make sure they were okay. 

_Sure_ , Hunk replied immediately, _Pidge and I are making cookies if you wanna hang out. They’re super good. Pidge has already eaten like ten. Kosmo has too. Sorry._

Keith never did like being by himself, no matter what kind of lone wolf jokes Lance liked to make. When he was a kid he didn’t have a lot of options, but he’d liked dormitory life at the Garrison. Liked being around all the other cadets, even if he never really tried to make friends, and maybe a lot of them hadn’t liked him being around at all. Back then, Shiro was the one who liked to get lost in the desert for days at a time. 

It was tempting. Cookies were tempting. Being with his friends was tempting. But he messaged back: _Rain check_. He felt the kind of restless that didn’t get better around other people. It was a nameless sort of restless, too focused to be anxiety, too sharp to be grief. Punching and kicking a bag until his hands were shaking too hard to make a fist had helped, but he still. Couldn’t. Sleep.

He rolls onto his belly with a sigh. For once the wolf isn’t taking up two thirds of the bed; he’s abandoned Keith for the evening, probably to eat his weight in cookies and get his fill of belly scratches. The room is quiet; the only noise is the odd shifting sounds of the _Atlas_ , which had breathed even before Shiro brought her to life. It makes it hard to tell where Shiro is or isn’t. 

Keith’s shoulders burn with exertion. His palm burns where Shiro kissed him.

Part of Keith is angry. At himself. At Shiro still. He might never not be angry at Shiro, like he’s never stopped being angry at his dad for running back into that fire. It had occurred to him, belatedly, watching the punching bag swing, that Shiro’s awkward fumblings might have been him trying to apologize. He’d switched to the gladiator program after that, and torn apart a few bots.

Keith rolls onto his side. He’s always been a restless sleeper. Shiro used to tease Keith that he tossed around in his sleep like a yeillu in a death roll. His only cure had been to hold still and let Keith wrap all his limbs around Shiro -

Keith scrubs his hands over his face. This was crazy. _Shiro_ was crazy. All of them were, probably. He shouldn’t be thinking about the past. He should be figuring out how to convince Shiro to leave this whole _Defender_ conspiracy alone. He should be back on Xaex, working on the ceasefire talks. He should be keeping his head down.

It was just - 

God it’s just been so long since -

\- since he believed the stories too. Since he had anything to hope for.

He misses the sex, of course. Sex with Shiro had been incredible, as natural and exhilarating as piloting. The details have gotten fuzzy as the years wear on: he doesn’t really remember the first time they kissed, or the negotiation of emotions that must have happened before they’d tumbled into bed together. He remembers feeling focused and invincible. He remembers riding Shiro with abandon, both of them desperate for it, clawing red lines into each other. He remembers an uncomplicated quiet in his mind. He remembers being in Red, and Shiro in Black, and the two of them soaring through the sunset of some planet or another, their movements perfectly in sync. He’d known exactly what Shiro was going to do, and Shiro had known the same of Keith, and they’d pushed each other higher and higher into the atmosphere and up into the stars. He’s never laughed like that in his entire life. Not before, and not since.

He’d really thought they were going to win. He’d really thought that Voltron was the strongest weapon in the universe, and they were the only ones who could pilot it, and that if they fought hard enough, they could bring peace to the universe.

Keith turns over onto his back, glaring up at the ceiling. His eyes are dry. His stomach grumbles. His skin feels dry too, stretched too tight over his skull and the bones in his hands. He needs to sleep. He sighs, and the room sighs with him.

He raises a hand and, cursing himself every second, presses his lips against his palm where Shiro had kissed. Is Shiro watching him right now? Seeing how pathetic Keith is? All he can taste is his own sweat and skin. All he smells is himself. His body shudders with the memory of impact: his fists against the bag, his back against the wall, his thighs around Shiro’s ears. 

He squirms, full body, his other hand fisted in the blankets. The air around him is the perfect temperature. The weight of the blanket across his legs is more for comfort than anything else: the sensation of being held down. _Is_ Shiro watching him? Or is Keith alone?

Keith squeezes his eyes closed. He needs to sleep. He needs to feel better. He needs to _feel_. He opens his eyes and breathes out, long and slow. “Okay,” he says to the empty room. “Look away or don’t.”

He rolls over, stretching as far as he can, and snags his duffle off the floor. He shoves his hand through his balled up clothes until he reaches one of the inner pockets and the little bottle of lube that he keeps stashed there. He sits up enough to wiggle his shorts down, and squeeze a bit of lube into his palm. 

He’s mostly hard already. Has been, humiliatingly, since Shiro crawled between his knees and kissed his hand. The lube is cold and sticky on his cock, and then blissful slickness as he moves his hand up and down the shaft, getting himself wet. He keeps his eyes closed, afraid to see the lights flickering or the walls lengthening - or, worse, for nothing to happen at all. He imagines, as he usually does (cursing himself for years until even the shame became boring), that he’s in bed with Shiro. During the war a bed and uninterrupted hours had been a fantasy unto themselves and when he’s drawn thin like this it’s familiar ground to come home to.

So: a bed. Uninterrupted hours. The press of warm skin against his own, which he misses so sharply sometimes that he nearly cries. Warm blankets pulled all the way up, like being so tangled in each other that you can’t feel where your own body ends. Shiro’s bulk pressing Keith into the mattress, so close he’d felt like he barely breathed his own air. After a while even the soft grinding of his prosthetic became the soundtrack of sex. Kissing Shiro as they move together - not fucking, not yet, but getting there. Letting the pressure build. Sex that you could feel all over, from the tips of your toes to the top of your head, where Shiro buried his fingers in Keith’s hair and _pulled_. 

It was good. It feels good. His body feels warm all over, tingling as his fingers rub and stroke over sensitive nerves. His free hand roams over his chest and stomach, a comforting weight like the blanket kicked off and forgotten by his feet. He spreads his legs a little: arches his back, gasps as he pushes his hips up, fucking into his hand. Putting on a show, just in case. That feels good too. Back during the war they’d sucked and fucked each other anywhere they could - the Lions, the observation deck, in narrow corridors where the others could have stumbled across them at any time. Shiro had been desperate to live, to feel. Keith had been desperate to - he’s not sure now. He’s not sure he ever knew. He’d been desperately in love, maybe. Desperate to win, desperate to matter. Grateful that the hand Shiro had extended down to him so many years ago had pulled Keith into something so big, so important. 

He’d been dazed with sex. He’d wanted it all the time. He felt like any kid who first discovered sex: like he’d invented it, like he was discovering uncharted worlds. It made them both feel human. It makes him feel human now, when he spends so much of his time feeling nothing.

His next breath catches in his chest, and comes out like a sob. For a second he can’t tell if it is, and the moment of consideration stills his hand. He’s so turned on that it _hurts_ , but everything else hurts too, and most of all his heart and his pride. What is he _doing_? Shiro can _see him_ doing this, jerking off, alone in this - this weird, dusty monument to their old home. 

He’s so ashamed.

He takes his hand away. Grabs a dirty T-shirt from his duffle and wipes his hand and then, wincing, his cock. The shirt is soft and the contact feels almost good (but not as good as his hand, not as good as Shiro’s mouth, not as - ). He stuffs it back in the duffle and rolls onto his side. Squeezes his hard on between his thighs and tries to catch his breath. 

He shudders, and the room shudders with him, unnoticed. 

He falls asleep and, eventually, dreams.

He’s on Olkarion, which has been burned to ashes. In the dream it smells as if it’s still living. The air is heavy with moisture and the rustle of leaves. Before leaving Earth Keith had never felt humidity like it, never in his life. It felt like he was inhaling the jungle itself.

_After_ , the scale of destruction made Olkarion unrecognizable. The first time he’d yanked off his helmet he’d choked on the heat. Half the planet had burned outright, millions of acres of jungle gone. An uncountable number of lives gone too. Every charred tree and hill had looked like the curve of an crashed escape pod. Every blackened vine looked like a body. 

In the cities it had been the worst. Maybe in part because the vines were bodies, Keith’s eyes fooling him twice over. Haggar’s troops were merciless but careless: the Robeasts would descend, cause as much devastation as possible before the Coalition arrived, and then they would leave. There were sometimes survivors, after these attacks. Often enough that search and rescue was SOP. On Olkarion, the devastation had happened so quickly, so completely that at first anything seemed possible. There could be tens of thousands of survivors buried under collapsed skyscrapers and tunnels, or none at all. Keith had spent three days on the burned surface, assigned as escort for the rescue operation. 

Before the Alteans had taken control of the war that would have meant using the Lions to shift heavy rubble, provide transport, and add gravitas as Allura coaxed other Coalition members into helping their neighbors. By the time their focus had shifted to battling Haggar’s troops, an assignment like that meant only security. Sitting and watching the sky, helpless on two fronts, because there wouldn’t really be anything a single Lion could do against the Robeasts anyway. Three days of waiting and watching others do the work - for nothing, it turned out. Not a single Olkari survivor was ever found. Like Altea, the only ones who had managed to escape were the ones already off planet.

Just three days. Somehow it’s one of the ones that really stuck with him. The waiting. The uselessness. The taste of ashes. The shape of all those vines. He sees them in the dark, behind his eyelids, all the time. He dreams about digging into the charred soil with his bare hands. Just digging for hours, until he wakes up more exhausted than when he went to sleep. 

In the dream he’s digging - up to his elbows in ashes - but something in him knows that this dream is different. He’s digging to escape. He’s frantic about it, throwing great handfuls of earth over his shoulders, the hole underneath his knees getting so deep he can feel moisture soaking through his flight suit. 

_ Keith! _

He tastes panic. The ash drifting through the heated air sticks to his sweaty face. He knows that if he can dig fast enough, he can get away from the whatever is behind him. But his shoulders are numb and aching. His hands are coated with ash and dirt and the coolant the Olkari had used in their machines, thick like tree sap. 

_Keith!_ he hears again, and at the same time something grabs his wrist. Something living and green. He fights it. He cries out. He knows that if he turns, she’ll be there, standing at his shoulder like she always is, demanding that he look.

“Keith! Wake up!”

He wakes up. Covered in sweat. Panting like he’s run for miles. Hunk is standing over him, hands raised to show no harm. There’s a datapad in one hand showing an open call.

“What’s going on?” says the pad, in Kolivan’s voice.

“We’ve got a problem,” Hunk says at the same time. There’s so much happening at once. Keith can still smell the fire, the ashes. He looks at his hands but they’re as clean as they ever are. There’s a spot of dried lube on the pillow right next to Keith’s hand but if Hunk notices, he has bigger concerns. 

“A Castleship showed up in Xaex’s atmosphere ten minutes ago,” he says in a rush. “You didn’t answer when they called.”

Keith looks down instinctively at his pad. Two missed calls from Kolivan. There’s a message from his mom, too. Transmitted in the old codes. He stares at it for a long second, puzzled. Thinking maybe he’s mistranslating. It won’t make sense for two more days, when he finally remembers the message he sent to her the first night on the _Atlas_ , back when all of this began. She says: _There is nothing in the universe that would keep me from loving you. But it’s never too late to make it right._

He looks up. Looks from Hunk’s sleep rumpled face to Kolivan’s image on the screen. “Have they broadcast anything?” he asks. “Made any announcements?”

“Nothing,” Kolivan says grimly. “There’s been no communication from New Altea, either. When we couldn’t raise them, I called you.”

“Evacuate,” Keith says immediately. “What can be done about the locals?” 

“Depends on how much time we have,” Kolivan says. His image shakes a little, as Hunk bounces up and down on his toes, anxious. It would be funny in other circumstances. “There are eight agents on the planet surface, including myself.”

“Shiro!” Keith cries. The lights in his room flare instantly, so bright that they both flinch. It doesn’t matter. Keith asks, shielding his eyes, “Shiro, did the Council send orders for Xaex?”

There’s a pause. Somewhere, an alarm sounds within the _Atlas_ and then is choked off quickly. The answer is sent in data instead of words. The information drops into both of their pads, and Kolivan’s as well: Keith can see him glance down at some other screen. For a moment none of them say anything. Hunk’s shoulders heave up and down with his breath.

“Have Biekie coordinate a total evacuation with the Yihmi governors,” Keith orders, when he finds his voice again. “Anyone that’s on planet should assist getting as many civilians out of the city as possible, and then get out of the targeted area. Shiro, if for any reason additional orders are sent or the timeline moves up, alert every Blade on Xaex about it immediately. Kolivan, will you send Shiro the information for our agents?”

“Done,” Kolivan confirms. He looks down, presumably at his wrist communicator, and back up.

“Good luck, Kolivan,” Hunk says. “Vrepit sa.”

“Report in once you’re clear,” Keith says. The corner of Kolivan’s mouth twitches. He signs off without saying anything else, and Keith and Hunk are left staring at each other, wordless and helpless. The light burns Keith’s eyes. There’s nothing he can say. Nothing he hasn’t already said - or that Allura said, or Shiro, or Kolivan - when this happened before.

There’s a noise from the hallway, and they both turn towards it automatically. It sounds like feet slapping quickly down the stone tiles. They see Coran run past at full speed, notice Keith’s open door, and skid to a halt somewhere out of sight. A moment later he reappears, one hand on the door frame and the other on his knee, bent over from exertion. “What’s,” he pants, “the commotion about? I heard - hahhh - an alarm. Are you all alright? Are we under attack?”

Hunk moves towards Coran like he’s underwater. The pad is still in his hand, and he goes to tuck it into his back pocket, but he’s in his pajama pants and it falls to the floor with a metallic clatter. 

“The Council is bombing Xaex,” Hunk tells him. His voice sounds like it comes from very far away. “The order came through to cleanse the city. They’ll begin firing in two vargas.”

Coran gapes at him. “But the people who live there! That’s not enough time -“

Then he goes quiet too. The only sound in the room is the humming of the _Atlas_ , high and anxious. “The separatists rejected the ceasefire,” Keith says. “The Council’s terms were unacceptable. The separatists refused to leave Yihmi, or cease fire so that the civilian population had time to leave the city. They demanded more negotiation, and the Council -”

Hunk turns away abruptly, his hand covering his mouth. Keith thinks about standing up and walking over to him, offering comfort. But Hunk’s eyes are dry and blank. 

“Isn’t there any way we can help?” Coran asks weakly. 

It’s not possible to get to Xaex in time to stop the city from being destroyed. The _Atlas_ doesn’t have a teludav; she has to go through the same travel permissions as any other ship. Even at her top speed it would take days to reach Xaex. The purification order came from Rahz, one of the top Peacekeeper Generals. The Paladins of Voltron hadn’t come close to her authority even during the war.“No,” Keith says hoarsely. “There’s nothing we can do.”

In his lap, his hands make tight fists. 

 

 

-

 

 

Keith is still awake when Shiro knocks on his door, a few vargas later. He’s not sure what time it is, caught between Xaex’s twenty three varga day and the meaninglessness of time up on the _Atlas_ , his memories and life folding in on themselves like a game of Bophredian xoks. 

Hunk and Coran had each stumbled off a while before, raw and grieving, leaving Keith with nothing to do but fold himself back into bed and stare at the ceiling. They’d waited out the two vargas without speaking, Hunk clutching at his data pad as if it would help. Coran had left and come back with steaming mugs of tea and the last of the night’s cookies, which still sat untouched on the table. He should eat them. He shouldn’t let them go to waste. He’d felt Shiro’s presence throughout their vigil, though the man himself hadn’t shown his face. 

Keith had wanted him to. He can admit that to himself. He’d wanted Shiro there. He always wants Shiro there.

Still, when the knock comes, Keith is slow to drag himself upright. His eyes feel gritty. His body weighs a thousand pounds. On the other side of the door, Shiro’s eyes are red rimmed but his hair is still wet from a shower. His clothes, Altean-style today, still carry the folds from where he must keep them in a drawer. He’s got a bag over his shoulder, and what smells like a cup of coffee in his hand. 

He doesn’t say anything. For a long moment they just stare at each other, and then Shiro blushes. Keith’s baffled and then he isn’t: then he’s blushing too, remembering the show he put on last night, alone in his room. Guess Shiro had been watching after all. Keith turns away from the door, dragging both hands through his loose hair.Shiro takes it as an invitation and steps inside.

“Kolivan‘s been in contact,” Keith reports tiredly, though Shiro probably monitors all incoming and outgoing traffic even on a normal day. “Two Blades were killed during the bombing. He’s been denied reentry to the planet surface so far. Civilian casualties are … unknown.”

Shiro holds out the coffee. When Keith takes it, their fingers brush. 

Keith turns away and sits down heavily on his bed. “This was my fault,” Keith tells him, staring at the ground. “I should have been on Xaex, helping with the negotiations.”

Shiro sits down too, next to Keith. _I wanted to show you something_ , he says.

“I shouldn’t have come here,” Keith says, unhearing. “I don’t know why -” He trails off. He can’t lie to Shiro. He knows why he came when Shiro called, what he was hoping for.

_ Would it have stopped them? If you were on Xaex. _

Keith sighs. He takes a long sip of the coffee and, despite himself, laughs. It’s so strong that it’s almost undrinkable, thick enough to chew on and a little scorched. Somehow, through all his years in the military, cohabitating with his ex, and traveling at high velocity in small metal containers with Pidge’s dad, Shiro has managed to sabotage every attempt anyone has ever made to teach him how to brew a pot of coffee. He hated the stuff so much that he included a full quarter pound of tea in the meagre weight allotted for personal belongings on the Kerberos mission. And yet here it is, in Keith’s hands: the universe’s worst cup of coffee. He’s not sure if it’s meant in sincerity or to get Keith to smile. He takes another sip. Horrible.

The real answer to Shiro’s question is no, and they both know it. The Council does what the Council wants. They did during the war and they do it now. After a while even humanitarian atrocities fade into the background, made normal by repetition and powerlessness. Whenever he leaves the _Atlas_ it will be to go back to the Marmora, who are as much under the Council’s authority as the Ministry of Peacekeeping or the Ministry of Alchemy - and his first assignment will probably be back on Xaex. It will take the region decaphoebs to regain the unsteady security they’d clawed out for themselves, assuming that their neighboring states don’t seize the moment and the port city and all of Yihmi’s resources along with it. The job will turn from preventing a famine to triaging one. They’ll be needed on Xaex, him and Hunk and the other Blades, needed to save lives -

\- Lives that just got turned upside down and destroyed for _no reason_ except that they could - 

No. They’ll be _needed_. Needed to save lives. That’s more important than what Keith’s feeling now. 

He can’t say any of this out loud. The words feel like they’re strangling him alive, caught in his throat like a bone. He takes another sip of coffee, which burns all the way down and lands in his stomach like acid. 

Shiro pulls the bag off his shoulder and rummages through it. Keith watches him do it with dull eyes. He’s not surprised to see Shiro pull out two of the memory sharing headsets. He’s nothing at all. He’s empty, all the way through. 

_I wanted to show you something,_ Shiro says again.

“I’m tired,” Keith says. It’s not a lie. He _is_ tired, bone-deep tired. It’s been so long since he’s been able to rest. 

_I know,_ Shiro says. He looks tired too. He smells nice. He’s close enough that Keith can almost feel the warmth of Shiro’s thigh against his own. His prosthetic hand lifts and then settles again on the bed - he’s not as bold as he was yesterday. He picks up one of the headsets instead and offers it to Keith. 

Keith takes it, and holds it between his hands. “More proof?” he asks. Shiro shrugs.

_ Depends on how you look at it. _

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

VeXilum was the most beautiful planet that Shiro ever set foot on. It was a Balmera - a particularly old and graceful one. It was blessed, unusually for a Balmera, by an abundance of water, which had allowed its inhabitants to flourish for tens of thousands of years before the universe had ever heard of Zarkon. The largest city was named Cemanahuatl and it was a marvel, the kind of marvel he remembered from picture books of ancient Earth. Great pyramids jutted up from a dense, busy city, surrounded by miles of floating gardens, cut crosswise by sweet smelling aqueducts. Walking around its streets had been like walking around in a dream. 

In the early days of the war, when the number of liberated planets had been only in the dozens, VeXilum had welcomed Voltron and its Paladins, and Coran had wept with joy to see the old ways maintained, the prayers that he’d learned on his grandfather’s knee still faithfully delivered to the Balmera beneath their feet. Cemanahuatl’s gardens were nurtured by tiny purple crystals that floated free in the water and washed up on its shores. The Balmerans here - so different than the stooped, rocky Balmerans of the Javeeno Star System - were tall and broad and healthy, and they sparkled in the sunshine with all those little purple crystals, which they sewed into their garments and crushed to paint their buildings with, and gave freely as gifts. 

One day their hosts had taken them on a wide, flat barge out into the center of the lake that surrounded Cemanahuatl, and they’d picnicked lavishly out on the water. Shiro had gone so far to forget himself and his responsibilities that he _fell asleep_ on the barge in front of everyone, and failed to prevent a minor intra-Paladin scuffle that sent Lance into the lake. He’d woken up at the splash and Lance’s indignant, out of sight shouting, to find himself with his head pillowed on Keith’s thigh, his eyes shaded casually from the sun by Keith’s hand. 

The memory that Shiro shares with Keith is not of VeXilum - or at least, not of being there.

Unlike the Castle of Lions, where they’d been a bit spread out, the Colony Alteans (as Shiro had thought of them then) had quartered them in a single area of their Castleship. Each Paladin’s (and Shiro, and Coran) rooms lay off a single common room, which was outfitted in a fairly spartan way with a kitchen, a war desk, and the same sort of circular couches that they’d spent so many evenings on, in their prior home. The memory _starts_ with the click of boots down a hallway, but it _feels_ like easing into scalding, rushing water, churning uselessly with stress and anxiety and sadness and plans, always plans: the calculations of losing and regaining, thousands of different parallel realities laying themselves out for him to pick a path out of.

Shiro was walking down the halls towards their collective quarters, but his mind was on ViXilum, so vividly that purple flecked sunlight rippled across the walls, where no sunlight ever reached. When he breathed it was with the scent of the delicate barbecue they’d been fed, the hearty, tender meat dipped with fingers into little pots of vinegary sauce, the fizzy sweet liquor they’d washed it down with. Shared, the intensity of his memory gives Keith a sort of double vision, of Shiro’s memory of being cradled in Keith’s lap, and Keith’s memory of the same, so much dimmer and less meaningful from his end. It had been another day. A nice day. A nice planet. He’d barely remembered it.

 

Well. It’s not what I wanted to show you, anyway.

 

Allura was sitting alone in the common room, arresting Shiro’s movement halfway through the threshold. He hadn’t expected to see her there. Hadn’t expected anyone to be there at all. She didn’t move when the door slid shut behind him - her arms wrapped around her knees, her eyes a hundred galaxies away. It wasn’t until he sat heavily down next to her that she looked over at him.

“Shiro,” she said, and then flinched. “Oh! The others?”

“They’re fine,” he told her. “Everyone is fine. Hunk is in Cryo. Nobody else was injured seriously enough to need it.”

Her shoulders sagged. Her fingers twisted and wound together. “What about Pidge?” she asked finally, quietly.

Pain lanced through the memory, white hot, followed closely, intentionally, by shimmering light and the sound of water. Now that he was sitting he recognized immediately that it had been a mistake to do so. He hadn’t stopped moving in three days, too afraid to stop. He wasn’t sure he could get up again. His bones felt brittle enough to shatter. “Sleeping,” he said finally. “They gave her something to rest. When she saw Matt, she was -”

Allura’s shoulders hitched. Her face crumpled. “I see,” she said. 

They sat in silence for a long moment, neither of them looking at each other, and then Shiro levered himself out of the couch and went over to the kitchen to fill a bowl with warm water. He nearly dropped it - still getting used to the new prosthetic, so much bigger and powerful than the one the Galra had given him. Allura didn’t even blink at the noise.

She flinched when he sat back down, and took one of her hands within his. A clean towel set over his knee, and another dunked into the warm, sudsy bowl of water. “Oh,” Allura said faintly, as if she’s seeing for the first time the gore splattering her up to the elbows, spraying across her armor. “I hadn’t realized.” 

It would have been hard to miss, but Shiro’s own armor was hardly any cleaner. He wouldn’t judge even if he could. All he could do was bend his neck over his task. It was a bad day, one of the worst, but he knew they’ll be needed again soon - in the Council Chambers, or back on the planet to assist with the clean up, or off again through a wormhole if Haggar’s forces attacked elsewhere. The probabilities were endless and the choices were bleak. No matter which timeline they were on, she couldn’t face it like this.

When he was gently scrubbing the blood out from under her fingernails she asked, tentatively, “And you, Shiro? Are you all right?”

“Oh,” he said. He turned her hand palm up for inspection and then released it, clean again. He reached for the other. “I’m fine. What about you, are you all right?”

She turned on a smile for him, worn ragged at the corners, and then burst into tears. She collapsed into Shiro’s arms as if she were no larger than Pidge, her long limbs folded up to fit. In all the years they’d known each other it was the third time he’d seen her break down. Always behind closed doors. Always away from the others. Shiro was like that too.

He held her, one arm around her shoulders and the other around her knees. Circling her as best he could until the worst of it passed. He imagined taking her pain into himself, even just for a little while, to ease her burdens. At that moment he had nothing else to offer, no reserves. He had seen his friend die, and die badly. They had both watched their side battle Haggar’s forces to a bloody, personal standstill, knocking through entire cities as if they were incidental. The fires would burn on Sanook for phoebs. If it were one of the others, he would tell them that it was going to be okay. That it was hard, but they would win. That their side was stronger than the love of power. But Allura knows better than any of them whether or not that’s true.

“I hate this,” she said, harshly into his chest like a secret. “This is the wrong way to wage a war.” 

“People would die no matter what,” Shiro said. His cheek rested against her hair. She smelled like smoke and sweat and worse things. 

“Alteans killing Alteans,” she whispered. “Alteans killing Balmera! I could never have dreamed something so monstrous.”

Shiro laughed then. He couldn’t help it. She frowned, and leaned back just far enough to look him in the face, not so far that she’d pulled away entirely from his arms. “You’ll be disappointed by Earth, whenever we get there,” he said. “We’re just the same. We’ve never stopped killing each other. It’s the same wars you have out here, the same hate. Humans wouldn’t do any better if it were us leading the Coalition.”

“I thought we were different,” Allura said. “I never realized how foolish I was. My father always said, as leaders we have to do what’s right for our people. Even if it means great sacrifice. But I don’t know what’s right any longer, and I am no one’s leader. The Coalition is no longer mine.” 

They looked at each other for a long time without speaking. Her clean hand was in a fist over her heart. The other was pressed against Shiro’s chest, keeping herself braced. After a moment he put his hand over hers. The prosthetic dwarfed it completely. “It’s not foolish to expect the best of people,” he said.

“No,” she said. “But maybe it is sentimental. I know there’s hope, but at this moment I cannot feel it.”

“Maybe there’s not a better way,” he said. It’s not gentle. It’s not how he would have said it to the other Paladins. “Maybe this is the best that we can be. There are no utopian rulers. Any system in power ends up living out the same stupid cycles of war and pain.”

“Is there no reality where we succeed?” she asked, teasing him. The barest hint of a smile curled around her mouth. 

“What would that look like?” Shiro asked, and found a smile of his own somewhere.

She looked away, no longer playful. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I think perhaps you’re right, Shiro. The Galra value power above all else. Alteans value _life_ \- so we say - but there is no honor in the way we fight these battles. We make no quarter for the innocent. We behave as if the only lives that truly matter are Altean. What would a universe look like, governed by such - such selfishness and dishonesty?”

The question can only spark possibilities in Shiro’s mind: thousands of outcomes and realities, the probabilities laying themselves out like golden paths behind his eyelids. But as soon as the bricks are laid down they’re washed away by that scalding sensation, that unyielding fear that the way was never ending, and the war could not be won. He tried to imagine a system that did not oppress and corrupt, and he failed.

“We must not let it happen,” Allura said. 

The words felt stolen from his tongue. His thoughts were too hectic to make sense of her tone and the straightening of her spine. “H-how?” he sputtered. “What can we do to stop it?”

“I don’t know,” she said again, stronger this time. It was her turn to take his hands between her own. “But it doesn’t matter. We must fight on regardless. Utopia may not be possible, but surely justice is.”

“I don’t know what that would look like either,” Shiro admitted, very quietly.

“Exactly,” Allura said. Shiro looked up, surprised. Her eyes were downcast. Her voice shook when she spoke. “I feel like I’m being torn into a million pieces. This war is shredding my very soul. I have never felt such despair. Not even when we first met - when Coran and I found ourselves here, alone, our home destroyed and our families gone. I had already lost everything I thought possible to lose. But finally I feel like I can think clearsightedly about what is going on. We’ve lost, Shiro. Voltron has lost. We have - _I_ have failed. But I still have hope.”

“I never had any hope,” Shiro said. “I wanted Zarkon to pay.”

Abruptly, she laughed - high and clear and warming. It warms Keith just to hear it, half a decade later. “Me too,” she said. “My hope is a weapon. Zarkon may be dead, but we are not. We’re still here, Shiro. We have the chance to do this right. I won’t stand by and let Altea build an empire to rival the Galrans’. We _must_ fight, every bitter step of the way.”

“No more sacrifice,” Shiro said. 

She smiled and said, “Never again.”

 

 

.

.

.

 

 

Keith comes back to himself slowly, surfacing from their shared minds as if to the calm surface of water. He can feel purple-flecked light shimmering against the back of his eyelids. Can feel that horrible churn of fear, too. Shiro is watching him closely. 

“She knew? Even then? Matt was killed - god, _months_ before we even went back to Earth, before the _Atlas_ was even finished.”

_ Of course she knew. The Council didn’t really try to hide it.  _

“She never said anything,” Keith says, and adds, more angrily, “You never said anything.” 

Shiro’s mouth twitches. _You and I had other stuff on our minds._

Keith grabs Shiro by the collar and yanks him close, snarls right in his face, “Don’t be _cute_. You don’t get to be _cute_.” The rest of the thought tears itself out of his throat, agonizingly, like plugging into Shiro’s memories left the truth too close to the surface. “You _gave up_ on me. You said you never would and you _did_.”

Shiro looks stricken. _Keith, no - it wasn’t - I didn’t -_

Keith pushes him away. He covers his face with his hands. He’s shaking all over and he _hates_ it. He doesn’t want Shiro to see him like this. Doesn’t want anyone to see, but especially not Shiro. There’s a special kind of humiliation in letting someone see exactly how much they’ve hurt you. “Don’t,” he says. 

_ I - I’m sorry. You were -  _

“ _Stop_ ,” Keith says. “I can’t - Shiro, I don’t want to do this with you. This isn’t the time. I can’t.”

Shiro backs off. _Okay. I’m sorry. I know that I - I’m sorry._

Keith takes off the headset and throws it across the room, towards the desk. It goes strange halfway there and drops like a stone onto the floor. Shiro winces. After a moment he says, carefully not looking at Keith, _No. We didn’t talk to anyone about it. Allura was trained from birth to be strong. To never let anyone see her as anything **but** strong - anything but a leader. And I - I didn’t want to let you down, Keith. Can you blame us for not wanting anyone to see that we were falling apart? _

Keith tips his head back. His eyes are burning. His heart hurts. He wants to cry, but it doesn’t come. He’s locked away inside of himself. “No,” he says. “I don’t blame you.”

_ I know what we’d be risking. I thought - even up until this movement, I thought we could force changes by working within the Coalition. I know you did too, with the Marmora. I stood behind them while they signed all those laws and treaties, hoping I could still be a force for good, even like **this**. But it’s the same way that the Galra ran their empire, just with a prettier message of ‘peace and stability.’ They’ll never negotiate in good faith. They **can’t**. It’s not just Maeral or Rahz or Thevu in the way, it’s a system set up to value Alteans above everyone else. We have to make something new. _

For a moment everything pushes to the tip of Keith’s tongue - the weight he’s been carrying for five decaphoebs, every truth he’s ever swallowed to survive, to be allowed to get on with the work. He _fights_ it: fights to choke it all back down one more time, forever and ever. He can’t tell Shiro. He can’t. Not when Shiro is looking at him like this, as if Keith is something good.

“Will we win?” Keith asks instead. “Can we - is there any timeline where we win?”

_Maybe. Does it matter?_ Shiro says. 

“Yes,” Keith says, incredulously. “These are people’s lives we’re talking about. It’s _our_ lives.”

_Exactly,_ Shiro says. Slowly, telegraphing the movement, giving Keith enough time to pull away, he reaches out and takes Keith’s hand, lacing their fingers together. The prosthetic hums against Keith’s skin, noticeably warmer than the hand he was born with. _Keith_ , he says. _Have hope._

“ _Fuck_ ,” Keith says, with feeling. He stumbles to his feet, needing to be away from Shiro, needing to be close. He thinks about pushing Shiro down onto the bed and crawling on top of him, feeling the stretch of his thighs around Shiro’s hips. He thinks about being held so tightly that it snaps and cracks the ache out of his bones. He thinks about fucking Shiro, hard and messy, and it’s so vivid it feels like a memory, like the desperate ghost of sex.

“I want to kiss you,” he says feebly. 

The lights flare like a gasp. Shiro’s lips part. _I - I want that too._

Keith threads his hands through his hair, gathers all the loose strands back away from his face. Tugs hard enough that it hurts, a bright clear stab of pain. He drops his hands.

“Okay,” he says. His laugh is brittle. “Okay.”

 

 

-

 

 

In the end, it takes less convincing to get the others on board than Keith would have thought. But maybe he shouldn’t have expected otherwise; ten years ago they’d all jumped pretty readily at going to war against a ten thousand year old dictator, armed only with five magically powered robotic lions, and with not much more to go on than the thin instructions of a recently defrosted alien princess. 

“I thought we were trying to talk Shiro out of doing crazy stuff,” Pidge says, “not let him talk the rest of us into it.”

“You know for a second I was a _little_ surprised,” Lance says, “but after that I realized I’m not surprised at all.”

Hunk says nothing. He’s sitting with his arms folded over his chest, staring thoughtfully down at the table. Keith had laid his data pad out into the center of the table, before laying out the loose details of their plan. His fingers flick nervously over the latest unofficial casualty count from Xaex, the dueling broadcasts from the Coalition and the separatists, each purporting to be the truth. Hunk sighs - he works his jaw - he rubs one hand through his hair - Keith tenses in his seat - and then he settles back in the chair again. 

Shiro says nothing either. Keith can feel the weight of his attention like a hand on his shoulder. He’s letting Keith fight it out for him - or waiting to see what Keith will say to defend their course of action. But the right words are hard to find. Keith isn’t Shiro, or Hunk - whatever speeches he’s ever delivered have been written for him. On Daibazaal, before the famines had spread, Keith had stood up in front of the remaining generals of the Galran empire, and told them they were now part of the Voltron Coalition. He’d been coached up to the minute the Council had pushed him, dazed, in front of the cameras.

“Did you,” Coran says, and clears his throat. “Did you find proof, then? That Princess Allura might be, perhaps -”

“No,” Keith says quickly. He cuts a look towards Shiro, who dips his chin towards his chest but is otherwise expressionless. Wincing, Keith goes on. “Coran, I’m sorry but she _is_ \- she’s gone.”

Silence falls over the table, made more obvious by the muted video projected between them, one of the Communication Ministers gesticulating wildly, her denunciations lost on her audience. 

“This is for Allura,” Keith says. “She would have given anything for peace, but - not like this. This isn’t _peace_. The absence of war isn’t peace.” His hands make restless fists in his lap, trying to find the words for the rest of it: the untruths they were fed for so long, the lies each one of them have told to the Ministry of Communication’s eager cameras. His spine feels bent from so many years of looking the other way. But all he bursts out with, uncomfortably, is, “She deserves better than what we’ve become.”

_You’re being awfully quiet, Hunk,_ Shiro says.

“Hm?” Hunk says. He straightens his spine, his expression meditative. “Oh, sure. Yeah, I guess I was. I was just thinking how weird it is to here be with all of you again. I really missed you guys. I thought this whole part of our lives was over and it made me super sad.”

“Being a family,” Keith says softly, questioningly. The urge to look at Shiro is agonizing to resist. 

“Being Paladins,” Hunk answers. “Aw, Keith, don’t look so tragic. We’ll always be family. But no what I was thinking of was - you remember the first, I don’t know, decaphoeb or so after the war? When I was down there in the capital, being Executive Chef to the winners’ circle?”

“Sure,” Keith says.

Hunk nods and says, “Yeah, that was the worst time of my entire life.”

“The worst?” Lance asks archly. “I feel like that’s a high bar, man.”

Hunk shrugs, unruffled by the tone. “There was one night I took lil trip out into the banquet hall during service - I’d just sent out this _truly_ delightful amuse-bouche and I wanted to see how it was going over, and there was still a couple minutes before we needed to fire the next course. I stood out there watching all these people in their fancy suits and gowns and jewels and whatever, looking like they’d never even heard there was a war on, and like, Voltron’s face was just everywhere up on the walls? It was so creepy. Keith and I were talking a bunch at the time and you told me about all this awful stuff, just as bad as the war, like there were _kids_ being held in cages and sold as slaves, all over the place. And I thought, wow, I’m part of all this. I’m complicit. I dipped right out of the party and started packing before I even thought to call and ask if you had room for another warm body with the Marmora.”

“For you?” Keith says. “Always.”

Hunk bumps a shoulder against Keith’s companionably. “Voltron used to mean something good to a whole lot of people,” he says. “I want that back.”

“Allura used to say, we were always stronger together,” Keith says, looking from Pidge to Coran to Lance and then hesitantly to Shiro. “We can _change_ this. I know we can.”

Coran’s chest swells. His gloves are stained with tear marks. His mustache is quivering. He looks at Lance first, and says, “For Allura?”

Lance rubs at his eyes, scrubbing away any chance of his own tears. He nods. “For Allura.”

Pidge’s arms are tight across her chest. She chews on her lower lip, her gaze flicking from the table and up to Shiro and then back down again. Finally she throws up her hands. “All right, ugh,” she says. “Let’s form Voltron or whatever.”

 

 

-

 

 

Later - hours later, after they strategize and argue and the bones of a real plan begin to take shape - Hunk cooks everyone dinner. They take over the _Atlas_ ’ best stocked kitchen and Hunk pulls out all the stops. Keith loses track of the number of little dishes Hunk sets in front of them, he and Pidge and Shiro continuing to hammer at everything that could go wrong, Lance quietly cleaning up in Hunk’s wake. He lacks the vocabulary to describe the food Hunk cooks when he’s comfortable and happy, and he doesn’t have the words for how he feels either. 

The phrase Lance uses, standing on Hunk’s side of the counter with a damp towel slung over his shoulder, is _balanced_. The flavors are balanced. The taste of salt and bitterness is folded into the sweet and savory and pungent and warm and homey, so that each new little delicacy placed in front of them feels like it comes with a surprise, something for them to exclaim over and for Hunk to smile and say, “Oh, that? That’d be the fermented yalmor flank,” or “You must be tasting the flardryn myoglobin. I carbonate it myself!” or “It’s salt. Just salt - the perfect amount.”

The kitchen is expansive, but they’re crowded in close to what Hunk is calling his pass through, even though he’s only just pushing plates forward a few inches towards each person’s seat. Close enough that Keith is pressed against Shiro’s side, his arms folded and his elbows resting on the counter. On Shiro’s other side is Pidge, animated in her movements as she makes her points: stabbing her fork into the air, lifting up on her knees, as if she was about to launch herself right over the counter to see what Hunk was doing. 

Shiro, however, is entirely still. He’s talking through the evacuation process of the _Atlas_ with perfect, rigid posture, as if the slightest movement will make Keith stop what he’s doing, which is slowly, achingly dragging the back of his fingers up and down over Shiro’s ribs, the movement hidden by their positions and the press of their shoulders. Shiro’s breathing is ragged and his face is flushed. Keith doesn’t dare look at him. He sits and tries to control his own labored breath, and watches Hunk produce miracles.

 


	7. Chapter 7

 

The armor still fits. 

There’s no reason why it wouldn’t. The bodysuits stretch to whatever size they are. Hunk’s will fit him just fine, as differently shaped as he is now from when they were teenagers. Keith’s suit still fit when he reclaimed it after their decaphoebs in the time vortex, too.

It feels strange anyway to wear it, and he sits for a long time running his gloved hands over the smooth white shells of his thighs until eventually the wolf drops his heavy head on Keith’s knee, and wuffles softly through his nose.

“I know,” Keith says softly, and scratches one furry ear, tugs on the loose skin on the back of the wolf’s head. “Hunk’s right though. The armor means something to a lot of people. It’s,” and he almost chokes on the word, which is the same one Hunk used last night, “good optics.”

The wolf tugs his head out of Keith’s grip and settles back on his haunches, safely out of arm’s reach. They stare at each other, silent except for the wolf’s pants and Keith’s own shallow, uneven breathing. He wants to laugh at himself. He wants to keep talking, to pour his heart out to the wolf, whose fur has been matted over and over with Keith’s blood and sweat and tears. But the melodrama is appalling, and anyway, Shiro would hear anything he wants to confess, anyway.

He’d dreamed of Allura again, like he does most nights, but the dream was quiet, nothing like the terror of digging to nowhere on Olkarion. She’d been sitting at the edge of his bed with her hands braced on her knees. She didn’t seem to notice when he’d opened his eyes, lost in her own thoughts. For once, it hadn’t occurred to him to be afraid of her. 

He’d reached out from under his blankets and put his hand over hers. She’d turned to look at him, her eyes wide and shocked. She’d spoken, but he can’t - he doesn’t remember what she said. Her words slipped over and through the air between them, but lost focus by the time they reached his ears. _Look_ , she’d said, and _you_ , and _know_ , and _find_. 

She’d reached for him and laid her hand on his cheek, directly over the scar that Shiro put there, so many decaphoebs ago. And in the dream Keith had closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was awake and it was time to get ready. 

Keith sighs and puts his face in his hands. His gloves smell like the wolf’s fur. The textured material tugs at his scar. “I couldn’t do anything for her,” he whispers into his hands, too quietly for maybe even the _Atlas_ ’ sensors to catch: a secret just for himself. “But I can make it right. It’s not too late. It’s _not_.”

He missed her. He’d loved her, admired her, had killed for her, had fought for her, would have died for her. And for almost five decaphoebs he’d tried not to think of her, had avoided honoring her. Had failed, over and over again, to be as brave as she had been. Had stood by and _watched_ -

Keith drops his hands. The wolf is still sitting there, unblinking, waiting. Keith takes a deep breath, and stands up. He straightens his armor. “Yeah, okay. I’m ready.”

Shiro’s already on the bridge when Keith arrives, standing with his hands spread across the captain’s station. He doesn’t turn, and as Keith approaches his side he sees Shiro’s eyes are shut tight and moving rapidly behind the lids. 

“Good morning, Number Four,” Coran says, and Keith jumps. Coran is sitting in his old seat, swivelled back to look up at Shiro, one ankle crossed over his knee. He’s cradling something in his hand that sparkles faintly in the low light of the bridge, and after a moment Keith recognizes it as a pair of earrings, flashing chips of shivery light, pink and blue, over Coran’s palms.

“Hi Coran,” Keith says slowly. “Is he -”

“Only for a few doboshes now,” Coran says. He sounds unconcerned. “Not more than ten, I should say. Why, hello there. No no, my mustache is quite clean, thank you.” This last part was directed towards the wolf, who had gone over to say hello in his usual way.

“O - okay,” Keith says, and looks helplessly towards Shiro. “So he’s -”

Coran says nothing, just wiggles his mustache back and forth, and drops the earrings back into the breast pocket of his coat in order to scratch both of the wolf’s ears at once. An uncomfortable quiet drops over the bridge - uncomfortable on Keith’s end, at least. Coran looks perfectly content, sitting and murmuring courteous nonsense to the wolf. Shiro might as well be a statue.

They used to be pretty close, he and Coran. Or at least, Coran had been there for Keith during the war, had cared for him like he’d cared for all of the Paladins. He’d been part of Keith's family too.

“Coran, are you - ?” Keith asks, and hesitates so long that Coran looks up expectantly. “Ready,” Keith says finally, awkwardly. “Are you all ready?”

“Oh, of course,” Coran answers. He gives the wolf a final pat, apparently taking the question as a dismissal. He stands, brushing his hands over his chest and legs to try and dislodge the fur left behind. “But this will be my third go ‘round, you know. One might say I’ve gotten rather used to this part of things.”

“Oh,” Keith says, and then can’t think of anything else to say. Does Coran dream of Allura? How often does he see her face, in comparison to the faces of everyone else he’s lost over the years? He’s never even thought to ask Coran how it had felt the last time he’d stood with his toes at the edge of a war, if it had ever occurred to the old man that maybe it would just be easier to step back. Does he ever wish that things had been different?

As he passes the captain’s station, Coran drops a heavy hand on Keith’s shoulder. The look on his face is serious, which is unnerving even under the best circumstances. _I’m sorry,_ Keith thinks, not knowing exactly why. 

“Are _you_ ready, Keith?” Coran asks.

“Yeah,” Keith says and then admits, more quietly, “No. Not really.” 

“Everything will be fine,” Coran says, and for a brief second Keith hates him, is overwhelmed with fury and a child’s searing sense of injustice, because nothing was fair, and nothing had turned out fine before. Then Coran laughs and adds brightly, “Or it won’t! Who knows?”

“Guess we’ll find out,” Keith says. After a moment he puts his hand over Coran’s and says, simply, “For Allura.”

The old man smiles so widely that his whole face creases up with it. “I’m _so_ looking forward to seeing her again,” he says wistfully. “One way or another.”

He shakes Keith, just once, and lets go. And then he leaves to take up his position, and they’re left alone on the bridge.

The wolf lays down, resting his chin on his paws. His eyes flick back and forth between Keith and Shiro. “Yeah, okay,” Keith mutters, but when he reaches out to jostle Shiro his hand stills, hanging in the air between them. After a moment he drops it, and settles back against the captain’s station, folding his arms over his chest. He’s early. They’re not due to start the operation for another ten dobashes or so. They have time. And maybe Coran is right. Maybe this is all the time they’ll have.

So he looks at Shiro. It feels strange to do it. For decaphoebs Keith has flinched just at the thought of the man. And now here he is: as large in life as he’s ever been, tall and broad and aging into a graceful sort of handsomeness. There’s a leanness in the skin around his eyes and along his jaw more than actual wrinkles, although Shiro has those too. It hurts to look at him. Maybe it always will. Maybe love can only ever feel like this, when your whole self has been scraped to pieces and left for you to put back together again. 

But there - unexpectedly, buried under the hurt: excitement. Warmth, like the smallest of suns burning in his heart. There’s a smile on Keith’s face, and he’s not really sure how long it’s been there. But it is funny, isn’t it? Ten decaphoebs since Keith first followed Shiro into the stars, and here they are again. 

_Do I have something on my face?_ Shiro asks, without opening his eyes.

_Just your face, old timer_ , the ghost of fifteen year old Keith whispers. _I love you, I love you, I do,_ echo the ghosts of Keith at seventeen, twenty-two, and twenty-nine. 

When Keith doesn’t say anything, Shiro opens his eyes and does a double take at the Paladin armor. _K - Keith,_ he says. _You look, uhm. Real good._

“Thanks,” Keith says. “You do too.”

Shiro glances down at himself, a little self consciously, and shrugs. _I miss my old one,_ he admits.

Maeral, the Sacred Altean who has saved their lives after the quintessence field, had made Shiro this set of Paladin armor personally, after he’d been fitted with the Altean prosthetic. It’s white all over, and different in more subtle ways too. The V on his shoulders is a little thicker than the rest of theirs; the chest piece is longer, protects a bit more of his stomach; it doesn’t have the hip pouches, making Shiro’s waist look trimmer and the rest of him even broader than he already is. 

Keith realizes abruptly he’s been staring at Shiro’s chest for way too long, but when he looks up and meets Shiro’s gaze the other man looks away instantly and turns red. They’ve been standing there and staring at each other, like idiots. 

_ Keith, I wanted to tell you -  _

“Shiro, there’s something -“

They break off, embarrassed. Shiro makes a little go ahead motion. Keith clears his throat. “Is uh, is everyone in position?”

_Not yet,_ Shiro says, and quirks a smile at Keith. _Lance is still in the shower._

“If he’s not out in two dobashes, turn the water real cold,” Keith tells him, and Shiro’s smile grows wider.

_Yes sir,_ he says, and has the actual fucking balls to _wink_ at Keith.

It’s hard not to laugh. There’s a wall around Keith that he can feel crumbling like a physical thing. His stupid heart is pushing brick after brick out of place, letting in the light. There’s an expression on Shiro’s face that looks like diving off cliffs. He’s excited too.

The grin on Shiro’s face fades slowly as they look at each other - again, Keith curses himself, even as he feels helpless to look away - and he says, _Keith_ -

A screen pops up on the station, and both of them jump. “Oh,” Hunk says. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt, wow.”

Keith rubs a hand over his face. His whole body feels hot. “It’s fine, what’s up?”

“Oh, you know, just checking in,” Hunk says casually. He’s speaking in a hushed, awkward whisper. “Seeing as we’ve got about eight dobashes til kickoff. Wanted to make sure we were good. No delays. All ahead on schedule. That sort of thing.”

Over Hunk’s shoulder, the mess hall is thronging with people. There are dozens of people who live above the _Atlas_ full-time, taking care of her various systems, keeping watch over her pilot, monitoring the health of New Altea from above. There are five people who will not evacuate when the sirens sound in ten dobashes, who will need to be dealt with. Hunk’s got eyes on three of them. Lance will take the other two. Pidge and Coran handling the tech parts. Shiro at the helm, and Keith by his side, watching his back.

_All set,_ Shiro says. _Everyone else is nearly in place. When you hear the alarm, you know what to do_. 

Hunk grimaces. “All right. I guess I'm gonna finish breakfast while I still can.”

The connection winks out. Keith looks to Shiro, but it seems that the moment is broken: he’s staring down at the schematics already pulled up to his station, his eyes flickering back and forth. He pulls up something - a diagram of something Keith doesn’t recognize - seemingly at random, and flicks it away just as quickly. 

“Everything set?” Keith asks finally.

Shiro purses his lips. _I don’t know,_ he admits. _I was up half the night with Pidge and Hunk shoring up the Atlas’ firewall and locking down her redundant systems, but - there are so many variables. No matter what we’ve tried, there’s still about a four point nine two six percent chance that they’ll be able to physically access the ship once we’ve gone into lockdown._

“Gotta nail the timing,” Keith says, watching data flow by. It’s too fast for him to read, even if he could understand it. He’d gone to bed after they’d thrashed out the overall plan, leaving Shiro and Pidge and Hunk to dive in and get dirty with the non-fighting stuff. 

_We built in a twenty tick margin of error_ , Shiro says. 

“Per jump?” Keith asks.

_Total_ , Shiro says ruefully. _It’ll be tight. But most of the physical work can be done during the evacuation, so once it starts_ \- He makes a motion that Keith isn’t sure how to interpret until the memory slots into his brain like someone planted it there: Allura, flipping down the Ciradyl token in a game of khyrmin glynfiel. The Ciradyl has to be used carefully, strategically, or the game will blow up in the faces of the players - sometimes literally. Allura had been a master of it. Keith had never won a game against her, any more than Shiro probably had playing against Coran since the war. The motion means, a chain reaction. It means, no going back.

“Vrepit sa,” Keith says dryly. “How close are we able to get to Oriande?”

_Pretty close, but we won’t know until we get there,_ Shiro answers. _There’s been a permanent Altean base on Oriande since the war ended, but the white hole around it fluctuates pretty erratically. The normal exit point for teludav travel is seven hundred thousand, five hundred and twelve kilometers away, to allow for a buffer as the Petrulian Zone expands to its widest point. The_ Atlas _is faster than anything else in the Coalition’s forces, but we’ll still need to move quick in order to breach the white hole, grab the Lions, and get out._

Keith licks his lips. It’s the core of their plan and the biggest gamble of all: getting the Lions. They haven’t seen their Lions since the end of the war, since the Council declared an end to hostilities and whisked Voltron away, retiring the great weapon from a battlefield that no longer existed. Their location isn’t recorded in any Coalition or Council database that Shiro has access to, or that Pidge could pry her way into. It’s as if they just vanished, five decaphoebs ago. 

A mystical, alchemically powered planet that only allows Alteans to enter is their best guess for where the Lions are kept, but it’s still just that: a guess.

So far no one has suggested _not_ going to Oriande. Not searching for Voltron. The _Atlas_ is a powerful weapon, but she’s not as powerful as ten thousand years of hope. And maybe, too - Keith thinks - they all miss being Paladins as much as he does.

Steal the _Atlas_. Get to Oriande. Steal the Lions. Get away. Win the universe over, one more time.

“I bet it’s where they’re keeping Allura, too,” Lance had said last night, and Shiro had said _Right!_ And they’d started talking about how to find her on a mystical planet none of them had ever been to, and Keith had said nothing at all.

A countdown appears, bright green and bearing Pidge’s little cartoon. Five dobashes. _Everyone’s in place,_ Shiro says, and abruptly turns towards Keith, his face flushed. _Keith, I need you to know -_

“Yeah,” Keith says, and steps forward. Shiro takes his hand like the first step of a dance. Their arms go around each other. The armor adds a distance that demands to be closed, requires their bodies to curl, their hips and knees to be pressed together. Four dobashes. He can make all of this right. He can smell the warmth of Shiro’s skin, the ozone of the prosthetic. He breathes it all in over the pounding of his heart: the desperate way that Shiro holds him, the tender press of his bearded cheek against the crown of Keith’s head. They can do this, they can win, and even if they don’t, it will better than this awful half life. Three dobashes. They’re both shaking. 

Shiro pulls away and presses something into Keith’s hand. Keith looks down at it, uncomprehending. Looks back up at Shiro. _I made it,_ Shiro explains. His prosthetic hand covers his mouth. _Three decaphoebs ago. It was for you._

Two dobashes. “Shiro,” Keith says. His lips feel numb. His hands do too. “Shiro, this is a ring.”

Shiro nods, not looking at Keith. _I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. That didn’t say it before, that I didn’t tell you - Keith, none of it was your fault. I gave up on myself. I panicked and I made a terrible mistake, locking you out. You were better off -_

“Are you kidding me,” Keith says, staring at him.

Shiro shakes his head. He drops his hands and faces Keith square on. His prosthetic hand taps a nervous rhythm on his thigh. _I would **never** give up on you, Keith. I **couldn’t**. But you deserved so much better than what I -_

“No, I mean,” says Keith, each word getting tighter between his teeth, “Are you _kidding_ me? We have -” he glances at the little winking gremlin on Shiro’s display, “like _one dobash_ before the evacuation will start. Is now _really_ the time?” 

The Pidge gremlin turns red and starts counting sixty. Fifty nine. Fifty eight. _Now or never,_ Shiro says. He’s looking at Keith with aching, infuriating sincerity. Keith stares down at the ring in his hand, unable to meet Shiro’s eyes. It’s made of some sort of pale colored metal, undecorated. It feels warm in his hand. There are faint scratches on its edges, little dull spots, as if the shine’s been worried off of it. 

_You’re the love of my life, Keith,_ Shiro says. _No matter what happens, I want you to know that._

And it’s this, of all things, that breaks Keith open. It hits right where he’s buried everything he’s ever wanted. In the movies that the universe has made of their lives, there are moments like this, over and over again, where each of them gets what they want. Where even Keith gets the things he holds secret, the longing that hurts too much to ever bring out into the light. Declarations of love and fealty, of loyalty, of family. In the heat of battle and in glamorous palaces and in the privacy of Castleships as real as the one at the heart of the _Atlas_. Keith has seen so many over the years that he can almost hear the music swell over the harsh electronic beeps counting down, forty five. Forty four. Forty three.

Keith rubs his eyes, first to clear them of tears and then because he’s laughing and he can’t stop laughing and he can’t stop the tears either, something wild catching in his chest. A smile spreads like sunrise on Shiro’s face, disbelieving and tentative. Thirty three. Thirty two. He wipes the tears from Keith’s cheeks with both hands.

“You’re unbelievable,” Keith says, and gives himself just one moment, just three ticks, to lean into Shiro’s touch. Then he shoves the ring against Shiro’s chest. “Give this back to me when we have time to talk about it.” 

_I don’t have pockets,_ Shiro says, and gestures to his hips as proof. _Throw it out of an airlock or something if you don’t want it._

“I’m throwing you out of an airlock,” Keith vows. Twenty. He tucks the ring into one of the pouches on his hip. Nineteen. His hands feel empty, hanging at his sides. They itch to dig themselves under Shiro’s armor and pry it all off, feel the hot skin underneath. “Can you focus please?”

_I am focused,_ Shiro says, unrepentant. _Alarms in_ fourteen, he and the computer say together. _Everyone’s in place. Communications from the surface are normal._ Twelve. _Teludav permissions ready to file. Pidge’s virus ready too. Stage one, ninety two point six four percent chance of success._ Ten. _Once we’re on the other side of the gate it goes down to seventy three point three three three nine two. But -_

“You are too,” Keith says. Seven.

_\- Hunk put together a, a what? I’m what?_ Shiro frowns, stumbling over his thought. Five.

“The love of my life,” Keith tells him. Four. “You are too.” Three.

_Oh,_ Shiro says. His lips press together, holding back all of the things they don’t have time to say. _Well. Good. That makes this a lot less awkward._

Two.

“Yep,” Keith says, and takes his hand.

One.

The alarms wail. Keith flinches even though he was braced for it. The wolf leaps to his feet, his ears twitching back and forth. Keith holds out a hand, warning him to stay put. He’s fighting his own instincts to do it. The alarms are a throbbing siren beating a tense signal to his hind brain, the one that says _run away_ or _fight_. Screens pop up above the captain’s station, flicking back and forth between different security cameras. Each shows people putting down their tablets, their food, looking around. Looking resigned. Standing up and filing out of view of one camera and into another, drawing closer to the evacuation pods on each level.

_Brace yourself,_ Shiro says into their comms, and the _Atlas_ starts to tilt.

The angle’s not too bad to start. People start grabbing at the walls, pinwheeling their arms, but no one’s knocked off their feet. The wolf high steps nervously towards Keith, tail tucked. All around them monitors are coming alive, spewing information, lines of code, system checks. One camera shows Pidge, hunched over in a dark tunnel, so many cords twisted around that she looks mummified. Coran will be somewhere down near the engines, hopefully not chucking bottles of Nunville into the works. The crowd moves faster towards the pods, running now as the floors tilt further and further up. To those evacuating, it’ll look like the _Atlas_ is listing, the engines shutting off, systems failing. On the bridge, Keith is braced against the captain’s station. The wolf has retreated under Coran’s station, wedging himself under the chair as best he can.

“Everyone okay?” Keith grits out. The answers come rapid-fire over the comms: _Just peachy - Ugh, little queasy - Shut up and let me concentrate - Doing great_. “Okay, good. You’ve got about two dobashes, so make it count.”

Shiro’s fingertips just barely brush the surface of his station, unaffected by the _Atlas_ ’ list. Beneath his lowered lids, his eyes flicker rapidly back and forth. Tracking the position of the dozens of fleeing staff, or calculating and recalculating their odds, or steering the ship towards its careful sabotage - all of these things at once, maybe. He’s grinning. He’s standing tall.

_Pidge, are you ready?_ he asks.

The answer comes immediately through the comm: “I will be.”

Faintly, they can hear Hunk grunting, and the sizzle of his bayard. Lance’s comm is a steady stream of cajoling, talking his targets into abandoning their orders and evacuating with the rest of the crew. The view out of the observation window gets darker and darker, as they tilt further from the light of New Altea and closer to the stars. 

“Thirty ticks,” Keith says, and through the comms he hears Lance make a noise of pure frustration and say, “Get in the goddamn pod, Veronica! Shiro will be _fine_. Axca will you _please_ talk some sense into your wife? There. Is. A. _Plan_.”

There’s an abrupt _blip_ and the view of the stars flicker out, replaced by a transmission from New Altea. Maeral’s worn, handsome face peers down at them through the camera. In the background his advisors crowd around. Not worried, not yet - their expressions flat and resigned. Reflexively, Keith ducks down behind the captain’s station, his hand on his bayard as if that would do anything at all. 

“Takashi,” Maeral says, and Shiro shudders, shakes his head violently just once. “Hold on, we’re sending help.”

“Block them,” Keith hisses through his teeth. Across the bridge, the wolf is staring at Keith, bemused to find the two of them on the same level. Shiro doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move. The alarms are still blaring, each pulse an ache in Keith’s teeth, a fist that has to be pulled back. Bomb them. Bomb them like they bombed Xaex. Make them pay. Make it right. The _Atlas_ shoves its nose up towards the stars, and Keith’s feet start to slip. 

“Hunk and I are done down here,” Lance reports. “The last pod’ll be clear in five ticks.”

“Takashi,” Maeral says. “Can you hear me?”

Shiro flinches, his mouth drawing down into a frown. His eyes are still closed, and fear flickers hot in Keith’s heart. Is Shiro listening? Can he listen or has he gone somewhere else in his head, somewhere that he can control all of the variables, all of the outcomes? Through the comms, Coran says, “They’re trying to take control of the systems, Number One. We should be able to hold them off for a bit but we need to get out of range quick.”

“Almost there,” Pidge growls. “Just a few more ticks -”

“Shiro,” Keith hisses again, looking for signs of life. The floor underneath them tips and tips, and Keith wedges his shoulders under the captain’s station. He can only hope that the others were smarter than he was, have roped themselves in somewhere or attached themselves to something sturdy, that they’re okay, that Shiro isn’t - 

“We’re getting unusual readings from the ship, sir,” one of Maeral’s advisors says. “I - I think he’s blocking us. We’re locked out of the major systems.”

Shiro’s mouth curls into a snarl. His hands flex, fingers tapping out patterns at random, unrelated to the orders and diagnostics flashing by under his fingertips. Fighting whatever digital battle he and Coran are waging with New Altea.

“Done!” Pidge crows. “Shiro, ready when you are!”

Maeral tilts his head, frowning. His voice is gentle and dangerous. Keith can see alarm start to spread on the faces of the Alteans clustered around him, their eyes reflecting flashing purple light from their tablet screens. “What’s going on? Takashi, what are you doing?”

Shiro opens his eyes and says, _What we should have done five decaphoebs ago._

Maeral recoils. Just before Shiro cuts the feed Keith sees him start to turn and bark orders - and he sees, too, real fear bloom in Maeral’s eyes.

Then the screen goes blank, and the universe peels away.

 


	8. Chapter 8

Ten decaphoebs ago, the Paladins of Voltron got lucky. There were a lot of reasons why they were able to fly under the radar of the Galra Empire for the first few decaphoebs of the war, hiding in sparsely populated galaxies and building a coalition from the backwater planets. Technology mismatch, for one: the Castle of Lions had an operating system ten thousand years out of warranty. The Galra had relied heavily on an army of drones and clones, and after the first thousand years of Zarkon’s rule, they’d never bothered to foster an illusion that they anything but conquerors and colonists. Their systems were patrolled, but interstellar transit had never been controlled and the technology never centralized. 

The Voltron Coalition has none of these weaknesses: its interests are looked after by living, breathing soldiers. Each member planet pays its share, either in taxes, resources, or soldiers. The ship they’re about to steal is not only the crown jewel of the Coalition’s forces, but was built using Altean technology and Altean hands. Teludav transit is strictly controlled. 

Stealth is not an option. They’d all agreed as much last night. Surprise attacks worked against Zarkon, and surprise will give them an edge here - but not as much as the massive amount of information that Shiro and Pidge have been collecting almost incidentally over the last few decaphoebs. They’ve all been working within the Council’s system since the war ended, and they know where to strike and how to get out fast.

New Altea is covered with shielding and communication bands. Most of this infrastructure is below the orbit of the Atlas, or carefully maneuvered around her path. There are three windows each day where teludav travel cannot be scheduled, and six “blind spots” where gates are forbidden, because of the movement of these various essential elements through the atmosphere.

“One of them is right over my house!” Lance said last night, brightly. 

“So, like, do you want us to aim for that one and take your place out with shrapnel or what?” Pidge asked.

The teludav opens directly above the Atlas’ nose. The carefully timed gate takes out five satellites and slices through a radiation shield as it opens, causing three things to happen at once: communications are cut with sixteen galaxies, including the one where the Petrulian Zone is located; the primary satellite used by the Peacekeeper Ministry to send field orders is eliminated; and a radiation burst blankets the capital, scrambling surface level systems as well.

But that’s only part of the magic trick: as they pass through the gate another one opens, and another, and another, and in their wake Pidge’s viruses worm into the systems they leave behind, scrambling any records of where they’ve traveled to. To the Council, it will look like they’ve vanished into thin air.

Inside the _Atlas_ , it looks like alternating bands of darkness and light. Through the observation window Keith sees whole planets flash by and vanish. He feels like he’s shaking apart, the _Atlas_ pushed to her top speed to get them out, get away, to get them all free. He watches the wolf finally lose his grip and go sliding across the bridge, claws scrabbling for purchase, before he slams heavily against the captain’s platform. The impact would have sent Keith flying too, if it wasn’t for Shiro’s grip on his shoulder. Faintly, through the comms, he can hear Coran laughing.

The last gate closes behind them. The observation window shows Keith a graveyard of ships, uncleared despite the continuous presence of Alteans shuttling through it, as vast and dead as anything he saw in the worst days of the war. Beyond it is the white hole that hides Oriande, and it’s beautiful - so beautiful that it shocks Keith into silence. He’d forgotten what it was like to be here. The light thrown off by the white hole is almost a physical thing, bouncing and refracting off the wrecked ships scattered around it. The gleam works its way into every corner of the bridge, shifting and glittering like they’re underwater.

Shiro stares down at Keith. Keith looks back. Wordlessly, Shiro helps him to his feet and then they just keep looking at each other, speechless. It was done. The Ciradyl was cast. They were committed to this, one way or another. They were free. The feeling is so strange that Keith isn’t sure what to do with it. His whole body feels like it doesn’t belong to him. He feels like he could disappear entirely. Shiro’s the same - his expression stunned, his lips parted. The light plays off his white hair, his beard. It makes him look insubstantial, like he’s not there at all. The comms are silent, everyone probably picking themselves up. For just a few ticks it feels like anything in the universe could happen.

But it’s not completely silent. As the moment stretches, the two of them standing there, waiting for the other to say something, Keith realizes he can hear - _something_. There’s something here, and it feels like it’s calling for him.

“Do you hear that?” he means to ask, but what comes out of his mouth instead is an exclamation. “Shiro! You’re bleeding.”

Strangely, Shiro touches his chest first - right over the vee on his armor. Then, gropingly, his fingertips find the blood trickling out of his ear. He looks at his bloody glove, puzzled. 

“Are you okay? What happened?” Keith asks.

_I - I don’t know_ , Shiro says, _but we only have a few dobashes before they get the power back on, we need to move._

“Shiro,” Keith says, catching his arm. 

_I’m okay, Keith_. _We’ve got bigger things to worry about right now,_ Shiro says, and smiles crookedly. _Besides, my head’s been messed up for years._

 “Hilarious,” Keith grumbles, but lets go and tries to tamp down on the tightness in his chest. He turns away and says through the comms, “Paladins, report in. Everyone okay?”

Everyone’s fine, even Coran, who adds timidly, “even though I’m not quite a Paladin.” 

“An honorary Paladin,” Hunk and Lance both immediately yell through the comms.

“We should have about twenty dobashes before they get their comms back on,” Pidge says. Through the comm screen, she’s untangling herself from all of the wires and computers, most of which don’t seem to have suffered any harm from the trip. “I wasn’t able to get at any records for how many troops and weaponry are actually on Oriande right now.”

“It can’t be more than the _Atlas_ can handle, right?” Lance asks.

Shiro glances at Keith, seemingly unconsciously. Keith folds his arms over his chest. “Unless they’ve been keeping Haggar’s Robeasts in the same place as the Lions,” he says slowly, “we’ll probably be okay.”

_Six point nine two percent chance that they did,_ Shiro says. _There were - pieces left over on Sanook that might have been salvageable._

“You - I mean, the _Atlas_ took out the one on Sanook,” Pidge says. “So you could do it again.”

“Took out Sanook too,” Hunk says. “Not cute.”

_Well, stay ready,_ Shiro says. _We knew we’d be going in blind on this one. Once we’re through the white hole the_ Atlas _will be able to scan the planet and find the temple. That’s where we’ll go first. That’s most likely where they’re keeping Allura, and her rescue is our top priority. There’s a seventy two percent chance that the Lions will be nearby but either way, we’ll start scanning for them too as soon as we hit atmo. Pidge?_

“On it,” Pidge answers. 

_Good,_ Shiro says, and looks at Keith again, like he’s asking him for confirmation too. Keith shrugs, his shoulders right. He doesn’t look at the blood that’s still oozing out of Shiro’s ear, curling around the line of his jaw. “Okay,” he says finally, and Shiro quirks a smile at him.

_Okay, Paladins - and honorary Paladin_ , Shiro says, _brace for transforma_ - 

Mid-word, he collapses. It happens in stages. He grabs for the edge of the captain’s station. He turns toward Keith. His eyes are wide and shocked. His eyes roll back into his head. He falls towards the right, where he doesn’t have an elbow to catch himself with. The energy field of his prosthetic collides with the floor with a loud popping sound, blackening the tiles with soot. He hits the ground badly, his long limbs sprawling.

It happens so quickly. Just a few seconds at most. Not even long enough for Keith to call out his name.

There’s blood on Shiro’s face.

Keith’s knees scrape across the ground. He knows that the others watched Shiro fall, that they all have the comm screens on, that everyone is shouting all at once, the sound of it drowned out by Keith’s heartbeat, roaring through his ears. 

“Shiro? _Shiro_!” 

His fingertips smear through Shiro’s blood, shoving themselves up under the line of his jaw, hunting for a pulse. It’s there - hammering harder than Keith’s - but the bubble of relief that swells fast and all consuming bursts as Shiro starts convulsing in his arms.

“Shiro!” 

“What’s going on?”

“Keith, what’s happening?”

He knows what’s happening, but he can’t get his mouth to shape the words. He can barely even think them. Shiro’s heels drum against the floor. There’s nothing Keith can do about it. He’s frozen, fear swallowing him whole. Something is calling his name.

The bridge contracts. The floor underneath them buckles. Keith yanks Shiro closer, tries to shield Shiro’s bigger body with his own. Coran’s seat uproots itself and goes flying across the room. Through the comms he can hear the others shouting, the whole of the _Atlas_ seizing and contorting with Shiro. Can hear alarms, too, going off on every floor, the echoes doubling themselves over and over through the open channels and into a single dissonant scream. He’s going to be sick. Can feel it rising in his throat. There’s blood on -

A shadow passes over Shiro’s face.

Heart sinking, guts turned icy with fear, Keith looks up - and through the observation window sees three Castleships appear through teludav gates, blocking out the light from Oriande. “They found us,” he gasps out.

“How?” Pidge demands. “The virus should have eliminated any trace of us! They shouldn’t have been able to track the _Atlas_ at all!”

The observation window whites out: a transmission from one of the Castleships. The bridge of the other ship is crowded with Alteans. Rahz, the Peacekeeper General, stands still as a statue in the center of the screen. Maeral is next to her, eyes closed and hands lifted. His fingertips twitch and Shiro’s whole body shakes like it’s being pulled by strings. Thevu is with them, twisting her hands anxiously.

“Who needs to track you?” Rahz asks. “Where else would you go but here?”

Keith feels his lips pull back from his teeth. There’s spit filling his mouth. His hands and face are numb. He’s going to be sick. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. He can’t look at Shiro. Can’t look at the blood on Shiro’s face. It can’t end like this. They can’t lose already. “What are you doing to him?” he hisses.

“Preventing an enormous mistake,” Thevu says. “Keith, I can’t imagine what Shiro told all of you, but you need to _think_ before anything terrible happens. Right now, everything Shiro has done can be undone. But if you go to that planet, we cannot be responsible for what happens to you.

“Come home, and all is forgiven,” Thevu says, very gently. “Nothing bad will happen to any of you. Shiro isn’t well. You _know_ this. We can help him.”

“He’s fighting,” Maeral grunts to Rahz, whose lips press tightly together. Shiro is choking in Keith’s lap, foam dripping down his chin. His back arches, his face twisted in pain.

“You’re killing him,” Keith spits, “like you killed Allura.”

Maeral flinches at the sound of her name, his hands curling into fists. Shiro thrashes in Keith’s arms and it’s all Keith can do to keep hold of him, all he can do to hold on. “Allura saved us all,” Thevu says sharply. “She traded her life for the entire universe.”

“It wasn’t her choice!” Keith screams. It bursts from his throat, like something long infected has finally been lanced. He gags hard, tasting terror on the bile he’s been swallowing back for years, forcing the last words out between his teeth. “I know what you did!” 

The bridge explodes. Instinctively Keith curls around Shiro’s body. There’s glass raining down on their heads, sparks flashing as the lights overhead pop. He can’t see anything, can’t tell what’s going on. His nose is full of the stink of vomit and his own fear sweat. Shiro’s hair is in his mouth. Horrible crunching noises come from the corridor leading to the bridge. They’ll be trapped in here. With the room closing in like this, they could be crushed. They could be sucked out into space. The wolf whines high and long, and mixed in with the acrid smell of everything else is the clean ozone smell of him teleporting away to safety.

Someone is calling his name, but he can’t answer.

“Paladin Hunk, stop!” Maeral shouts suddenly. “You’re putting _countless_ worlds at risk. Trillions of lives that know peace and stability for the first time in thousands of years!”

Everything goes dark. The transmission from the Castleship, the lights, the groaning sounds of the _Atlas_ rearranging her own guts - it all blinks out and blankets them in darkness. The ship is abruptly, agonizingly quiet. In Keith’s arms, Shiro goes completely limp.

He thinks, for just a second, that the _Atlas_ has ceased to exist, or that they have actually died. That maybe his brain has shuffled him somewhere else, to wherever Shiro goes in his mind where he wins in every timeline. He knows that sometimes that when terrible things happen, a person’s mind will decide they weren’t there to witness it - no Altean alchemy involved.

Then he blinks, and sees the glow of Shiro’s prosthetic catching the silver of his hair. Hears his own ragged breaths, and the metallic sound of someone’s boots shifting in the darkness. Somewhere far away, Hunk says, “I think even those guys don’t really believe that.”

“H - Hunk,” Keith says. He sounds drunk even to his own ears. He flinches when something wet touches his face, hard enough he nearly falls over Shiro - and then smelly wolf breath surrounds him like a cloud, tearing holes in the edges of his panic.

Hunk kneels. The blue light of Shiro’s prosthetic bounces off the white parts of his armor: his knees, his chest. The shine of his eyes. “Keith, buddy,” he says. “You okay? We gotta go. I don’t know how much time I just bought us.”

“W - what did you do?” Keith says blankly.

“Turned off the _Atlas_.” 

“You can do that?” Keith asks. His teeth are chattering. He has to get up and move, to get Shiro and Hunk out of here, but he can’t figure out how. His body hasn’t realized that the immediate danger is over with, that they have to get somewhere else to get safe. “How’d you even get up here?”

“Kosmo brought me,” Hunk says. He pats the wolf. “You didn’t hear me yelling for him, through the comm?” 

Keith shakes his head. He doesn’t remember anything like that at all. “How’d you make it all stop?” He gestures to the bridge, which is a wreck - unusable, smashed to bits. 

Hunk looks abashed. “Well,” he says. “I mean not like I’ve done anything like this before but I guess worked okay right now. Commander Holt said once that the Atlas works like a big brain - that was how Maeral got Shiro’s big brain hooked into it in the first place, right? Well I figured that maybe if I attacked the same pathways that would, you know, knock a human unconscious for a little bit, I could cut off whatever magical stuff they were doing to hack the whole system.” Through the dimmed starlight coming in through the observation window, Keith can see Hunk shift uncomfortably. “Is uh, is Shiro okay?”

“I - I don’t know,” Keith says. “He’s still breathing.” 

“Are you okay?” Hunk asks.

Keith’s face and hands are numb. His tongue is numb too. It feels like another body entirely is speaking. He’s not sure he can stand up. He’s afraid to look down at Shiro’s face, even though he can feel his chest steadily rising and falling. The anwer’s no, Keith’s not okay. Hunk knows it just as well as Keith does. The comms were open the whole time. The others heard everything. They know what Keith said. “Let’s just go,” Keith says.

“Oooh, hang on,” Hunk says. “We can’t leave the brain. Shiro’d be pissed if we let them get ahold of it.”

It takes the two of them and Keith’s luxite blade to pry the container holding the Atlas’ crystal out from its place under the floor of the bridge. The condensed matter of the Castle of Lions shines even in the darkness of the _Atlas_. It’s so much smaller than Keith remembers. So insignificant looking. Shiro hadn’t even been in the same room as the crystal when Maeral and his assistants had plugged him into the ship’s neural systems in the middle of battle, trying to push the _Atlas_ to a greater level of power and what turned out to be the transformation they’d been seeking. The whole time they work Keith watches Shiro anxiously out of the corner of his eye, but Shiro doesn’t stir once. He might as well be dead.

By the time they’re finished, Lance, Coran, and Pidge have a shuttle ready on the lowest aft cargo hold, which they’d picked by virtue of being on the opposite side of the Atlas from where the Castleships dropped into the Petrulian Zone. With the crystal and human power sources taken out of the ship, the Council shouldn’t be able to _use_ the _Atlas_ , but it’s only a matter of time before they’re boarded - if they haven’t been already. Everyone is tense and silent, Coran and Pidge hunkered on the floor of the shuttle, surrounded by cords and machinery whose origin and purpose Keith couldn’t even guess at. 

“Holy shit,” Lance says, and jumps to help them lay Shiro down, as out of Coran and Pidge’s way as they can get. “What happened to Shiro? Is he okay?”

“Mmm, it doesn’t look good,” Pidge says, from her corner.

“It doesn’t?” Lance asks, alarmed.

“It’s the best chance we’ve got to avoid detection,” Coran says to her.

“Oh,” Lance says, shoulders drooping. 

“He’s okay, probably,” Hunk answers, when Keith doesn’t say anything. Can’t say anything. As soon as Shiro’s laid out, Coran’s coat under his head, all he can do is fold himself down too, arms wrapped loosely around his stomach. 

Lance stands looking over all of them for a second, hands on his hips, and then turns away to rummage around in the cabinets that line the sides of the craft. Hunk’s hand lands on Keith’s shoulder. It feels like the only warm spot in the universe. 

“Keith, you wanna - ?” Hunk asks, and jerks his head toward the pilot seat. 

He wants to say yes. His brain feels like a separate thing from his body, which weighs a thousand pounds and feels clogged up with unshed tears and bile. Once they were away from the chaos and immediacy of the ruined bridge he realized that he was having a panic attack, but the knowledge doesn’t _fix_ it. He feels, instead, like he can’t _stop_ thinking - his eyes darting around to take everything in without real comprehension, only to circle inevitably back towards Shiro’s unmoving body. 

He shakes his head. 

“Okay, I got you,” Hunk says. He goes to stand, and Keith catches his hand. 

“Thanks,” he manages to say. Hunk squeezes his hand back wordlessly.

Lance kneels down next to Shiro as the shuttle lifts, a medical kit in hand. “Didn’t look like you got hurt, but let me know,” he says over his shoulder to Keith.

“M’okay,” Keith mumbles. His hand finds Shiro’s shoulder and grips it. The backs of his knuckles brush against the warm skin of Shiro’s throat, deeply reassuring. Lance, for once, doesn’t say anything.

There’s a process to manually exit the Atlas’ hangars, even in the absence of power to a particular door or to the entire ship. Pidge handles that part, scrambling back inside the shuttle during the ten tick countdown. Keith doesn’t hear much of it, lost in his own thoughts. Escape is their top priority, but after that - 

The graveyard of ships is even more vast outside the _Atlas_ , stretching thousands of miles across. They make an asteroid field of corroded cockpits, shards of glass and metal swirling slowly around the vast white hole. It’s dangerous to fly through, even before you get close enough to lose power. It’s thick enough to hide in, maybe. Hunk takes them away from the _Atlas_ slowly, hoping that the Castleships will mistake them for one more piece of debris. Once they’re out of the ship’s shadow they can see dozens of shuttle crafts launching from the Castleships. Most of them head to the _Atlas_. A few break off and skirt the edges of the Petrulian Zone, hunting for them. One vanishes into the white hole.

“What now?” Hunk asks.

They’ve been flying without the interior lights on and the shuttle is dappled with that same false sunlight, shifting and worming its way across their faces. It feels like fingers are prying their way under his eyelids, scratching down his neck. He can’t tell if the others are as tense. No one’s said anything since they left the _Atlas_. Even Pidge’s fingers fell silent on her keys a few dobashes ago. She’s just sitting there, staring at nothing, or maybe at Shiro.

“We can’t outrun those things,” Keith says, not looking at anyone. “We don’t have the teludav. We don’t have the _Lions._ If we go near Oriande, we’ll either lose power or they’ll pick us up.”

“So we’re stuck here,” Pidge says. 

“Yeah,” Keith answers. “For a while, at least.” 

Shiro would say, they’ve faced worse setbacks. He would say, they knew the odds were stacked against them, but they’d find a way. He’d tell them that they were always stronger together. But Keith can’t even think past the pain in his skull, the lingering weakness in all of his limbs. 

“Keith,” Coran says. The words drop into the quiet of the shuttle like distant gunshots. “What did they do to Allura?” 

The silence grows teeth. 

Keith laughs. Just a soft sound, under his breath. They’re all staring at him - even Hunk, twisted around in the pilot seat. Even the wolf, his ears pricking to follow sounds beyond Keith’s hearing. Under his hand Shrio is stirring, fighting his way back to consciousness. 

Coran untangles himself from Pidge’s wires, and crawls forward on his hands and knees. He settles in front of Keith that way, his legs folded under him, his hands braced on his knees. He looks so old, and so sad. His steady eyes bore into Keith’s, sealing up his throat as surely as if Coran had reached out and strangled him instead. “You remember what happened to Allura,” Coran says.

Keith nods. Unlocks his jaw enough to admit the truth, finally. “I’ve known the whole time.”

Lance sucks in a breath. That’s all the warning Keith has before he’s knocked sideways. It’s been so long since he’s been punched that for a moment Keith doesn’t connect the pain with Lance’s fist. He hits the ground and just lies there, but a second blow doesn’t come. Shiro’s in the way - he’d woken up just in time to get in the middle of the two of them, though Lance is holding Shiro up more than Shiro’s holding him back. “Why didn’t you tell us,” Lance snarls, over Shiro’s shoulder. 

Keith pushes himself upright. His cheek feels raw and tender, an entirely different pain than the throbbing inside his skull. Different too than meeting Shiro’s eyes as the other turns to look at him. Why hadn’t Keith told them? Why hadn’t he said anything? Shiro’s expression says plenty. Confusion. Hurt. Betrayal.

Shiro reaches for Keith. Keith pulls away. “They said everyone was okay!” he blurts out. “Then they told me Allura sacrificed herself and Voltron defeated Haggar. They said it over and over and over. I didn’t - I thought maybe I’d, maybe it was some kind of bad dream, so I kept asking. I didn’t want them to be lying. Then when I finally got to talk to you guys you said the same thing. That Allura sacrificed herself and Voltron defeated Haggar. I didn’t know I was the only one who remembered, not until later.”

“You should have told us then!” Pidge shouts. “You lied to us!”

“You let us go on working for these people?” Hunk asks from the pilots chair. “Keith, why?”

“Because they _won_ ,” Keith says. Lance pulls at Shiro’s hold and gets pushed backwards. “By the time I figured it out we’d been front and center at all those parades for peace and the new order, and the Galra had accepted the terms of their surrender, and there were memorials to Allura everywhere, and it was all over and I didn’t _know_ _what to do_.”

He’s shouting by the time he finishes, each denial louder than the last. He’s on his feet, hand down on his thigh like he’s ready to pull his bayard on all of them. He wants to defend himself. _I thought they’d kill me_. He had believed that. _I thought they’d kill you guys if I said anything_. He’d believed that too. But to tell them that would be impossible. A worse betrayal than saying nothing at all. 

“I thought,” Keith chokes out, “I thought I was crazy. I thought maybe it was me, that I had made it up out of _guilt_ or something, because I’d been there and I didn’t save her. That I was -“

Shiro slams his hands down on the ground. It makes a stunningly loud noise in the small space. Keith shuts up so fast that his teeth click together painfully. Shiro’s looking at him, expression urgent, but nothing happens: they left his voice behind on the Atlas. After a moment he slaps the ground again, this time out of frustration, and looks frantically at the others, making a gesture with one hand: typing. Did anyone have a tablet, something to write with.

“This is hiding us from the Alteans,” Pidge says, gesturing to her computer. Coran and Lance show their empty hands. Hunk says, “Shiro!” and makes a series of gestures himself. Shiro looks confused and then lights up, starts motioning back.

“Is that sign language? You speak sign language?” Lance asks.

“Sure,” Hunk says. “My cousin’s deaf. My whole family learned it.”

“Why do you know it then?” Lance asks Shiro, and Shiro frowns at him. 

“He was imprisoned inside of a supercomputer for the last five decaphoebs, pretty sure he knows a lot about a lot of things.” Hunk shrugs. “Anyway, he wants to know what actually happened to Allura.”

Shiro turns back to Keith, nodding hard.

Keith sits back down. He feels, abruptly, very empty. He feels relief. Shiro knows now. They all know. The only thing he has to do now is deal with the fallout. “I wish I had,” he says, and mimes the shape of the headsets they’ve used to share memories. “It would be easier to show you.” Even though it hadn’t been, the first time they tried it, only a few days ago: the endless, consuming white light. That sticky, racing panic. Panic: what he’d felt seeing the blood on Shiro’s face, surging back up again when he thinks about, about - 

“You guys don’t remember going to Oriande, huh?” he asks, staring at the ground.

They look to each other in confusion. “We didn’t,” Pidge answers. “Allura and Lotor went alone.” 

Keith shakes his head. “We went to Oriande,” he says. “That’s where we won the war. That’s where Allura killed Haggar.”

Everyone stares at him. The light shifts across their stunned faces. “No,” Pidge says slowly. “We all did that. In Voltron. Haggar opened a rift in reality. We went in after her. We defeated her, in Voltron.”

“No,” Keith says. “That’s just what they told us afterwards.”

He tells them about it in halting sentences. The emergency orders recalling Voltron’s Paladins to the _Atlas_ , which had served as the Coalition’s mobile command in the final days of the war. The tense air in the briefing room, where Rahz and the other Generals had informed them that Haggar had taken control of Oriande and killed the Guardian that lived there. Even Allura had been confused. They’d been in the middle of an offensive against a major Galran general. Rooting her forces out of the three planets they’d dug themselves into had been a top priority, until it wasn’t.

“Wait,” Pidge says. “This sounds - kind of familiar? I remember being told to come back to the _Atlas_ , at least. There was a big fight about it, because I had taken the lead on tracking General Ladnok. Maybe. Were you there at the briefing?” She pointed at Shiro, who shrugged. “But you didn’t talk the whole time. It was really weird.”

Shiro’s lips thin, and he shrugs again. “I - I don’t know,” Hunk translates for him.

“You were there,” Keith tells him. “Pidge is right, you barely spoke to any of us. Not even to me, even though we hadn’t seen each other in a couple weeks. Maeral took over of the briefing and said that Oriande was a sacred place for Alteans, that it couldn’t be left in Haggar’s hands. He was really upset about it. Our orders were to liberate Altea’s ancestral home. We left for Oriande immediately after the briefing. All of us, even the _Atlas._ ”

Shiro twitches and turns to Hunk, signing rapidly. Hunk watches him closely and says, “Slow down, buddy, my cousin’s twelve years younger than me, my vocabulary is mostly about like cool cars and ghost stories and stuff. Okay. Okay. Wait but that sounds weird. Why would we have done that?”

Shiro turns back to Keith, excited, and repeats most of the same motions. “We took Maeral and two of his assistants in Black,” Hunk translates. “I think they went with us to Oriande. I remember! The other two had white hair too.”

“I don’t remember _any_ of this,” Lance says. 

“It seems highly irregular,” Coran adds. “I don’t recall any of the Sacred Alteans ever traveling into a combat situation. They were too valuable to risk.”

“Oriande must have been really important, then,” Hunk says. 

“Perhaps, but I don’t think I would call it _sacred_ ,” Coran says doubtfully. “More of a beloved story, really. Every child growing up on Altea knew all about the Sages of Oriande. The Flame that Burns, and all that. But it certainly hasn’t had any strategic value to the Coalition since then. Why, I remember in the early days after the war, I asked if we would be sending young Alteans there to train in the alchemical arts. The Council said there was no need, that the teachings could happen on New Altea.”

“What makes this place so special, then?” Hunk asks.

“It’s where they get all the magic,” Lance says, like it’s obvious.

“It’s not a place,” Keith says. “I mean, it is and it isn’t. I don’t - this is what I figured out later on, I don’t - I don’t know how to explain it.”

“It’s a connection point,” Shiro signs, through Hunk. 

“Yeah,” Keith sighs. “It’s the point where trillions of different timelines, alternate universes, whatever, all converge. It’s also a connection point to the quintessence field. That’s why Haggar wanted it. She had to split her forces between fighting us and fighting the Galra, and she was losing. She needed access to more power.”

Shiro taps his hand rapidly on the floor and then signs something to Hunk. “What happened next?” Hunk asks.

Keith rubs his temples. The pain in his skull is sharp and unending, even as the tension leeches out of his stomach. He looks out towards the window, at the unending light of the white hole, flickering as dessicated ships pass in front of it. He doesn’t want to tell them what happened next, what he figured out later. How carefully the Alteans must have planned what to do, to be able to move so quickly.

“We had rebel forces in the air, taking on Haggar’s pilots,” he says slowly. “We were up against ground reinforcement. It was a - it was a bad fight. Haggar broke off with some of her soldiers and went into the temple itself - Allura, Shiro, me, and the Sacred Alteans followed.”

The temple was so huge. He remembers it mostly in pieces, the way he remembers the _Atlas_ in pieces, too big to take in all at once. He remembers that it had smelled like old sand, the way the desert he had grown up in smelled at night. He remembers that the dust had sparkled in the air. He remembers sinking his sword into the belly of an Altean guard who had thrown herself in between them and Haggar’s fleeing back, how heavy she’d been afterwards and how something on her armor had clanged noisily on the stone floor of the temple when he’d thrown her off. There must have been other guards, but he only remembers the one. He knows there’d been rubble everywhere, statues that Haggar had smashed. One of the Alteans had wept as they ran, but maybe it hadn’t been the desecration that had shocked her. Maybe it was the anticipation. 

He remembers these things in great detail, because he’s played the last moments _before_ over and over in his mind, before he’d just stood there _watching_ , not understanding, wasting the chance to do _something_. The time between _before_ and _after_ had been maybe five or ten seconds at most, and in the end it only takes about the same amount of time to tell the others about them.

“Allura caught up to Haggar first,” he says. “They fought, and Allura killed her. She turned back towards the rest of us, and the other Alteans attacked her and killed her.”

“No,” Coran whispers, but Shiro’s fingers drum hard on the ground before anyone else can react. He signs forcefully at Hunk, eyebrows raised like punctuation. 

“You actually saw them kill Allura,” Hunk translates, and then says, “Jeez, Shiro, come on.”

“They used her to take out Haggar, and then they killed her so that they could control the Coalition,” Keith agrees. His voice cracks on the words. “They planned the whole thing. They wanted access to the energy fields, same as Haggar. Allura would have stood in their way. With her out of the way, the Council got full control of the Coalition, and access to the quintessence field.”

But Shiro’s shaking his head, turning back to Hunk. “Shiro, have a heart,” Hunk says, but conveys the message anyway, looking anxiously at Coran as he does so. “He wants to know how you knew Allura was dead.”

Keith meet’s Shiro’s eyes and hesitates.

Allura’s face had been covered in blood. She’d fallen down. She’d been very still. In his mind he tries to give her signs of life: that she’d moved, or her eyes had opened. But she’d been so still. He’d seen the blood, and he’d looked at the blood, and by the time he looked back up there had been a bolt of lighting arcing towards him and Shiro.

“I saw her fall down,” Keith says. “I saw her face was covered in - she was covered in blood.”

“So you didn’t actually touch her or anything? And you didn’t - Shiro, come on. Don’t make me say stuff like that. No! No way. Uh uh.”

Hunk sits back in the pilot’s chair, his arms crossed over his chest. He and Shiro glare at each other from across the shuttle. Pidge and Lance look from one to the other, mouths open. But it’s Coran who breaks the stalemate.

“Number Four,” he asks, “did you see what they did with her body?”

No. When he looked up there’d been a bolt of lighting arcing towards him and Shiro. Everything had hurt. Everything had gone dark. He’d woken up in the hospital. Starched sheets and a lumpy pillow. The _Voltron Show_ was playing on the television. His wrists had been handcuffed to the bed. They’d said everyone was -

Wait. Think.

When he’d looked up there’d been a bolt of lighting arcing towards him and Shiro. Everything had hurt. It had felt like the Komar, like they’d snatched away all of the quintessence from his body. He’d been so scared and so angry that he feels sick just from the echoes of it. Everything had gone dark. But there’d been - 

Push past it. You were there. You can do this.

There’d been a second -

Just one second, after the lighting had hit him, when he’d been lying paralyzed on the ground, where Keith had managed to open his eyes.

“Maeral picked her up,” he says. “They took her away.”

Coran’s eyes widen. He sags back onto his heels. “You’re sure?” he asks hoarsely. When Keith nods, he covers his face with his hands. He’s shaking all over. They all stare at him, stricken. Shiro reaches out and hesitantly puts a hand on Coran’s shoulder. They all lean close to hear what he’s saying into his hands.

“Coran,” Keith bursts out, “Coran, I’m sorry.”

Coran’s hands drop away, and there are tears streaming down his face but he’s - he’s laughing, wiping the tears away with the backs of his knuckles, his eyes squeezed tight. “ - becomes one with the flame,” he’s saying, still garbled. “Oh, my princess!” 

He lunges forward and grabs Keith, faster than he can scramble away - and then pulls Keith forward into his arms. Keith stiffens. On instinct he looks for Shiro, and finds Shiro gaping at them, just as surprised. Coran laughs again, and grips Keith’s shoulders with both arms, holding him at arm’s length. The look on his face withers a bit when he looks around and sees nothing but confusion all around him. “Oh. Oh, of course, you wouldn’t know,” he says. 

“Know what?” Lance asks.

In a sing-song voice, like he’s reciting from a poem, Coran tells them, “ ‘The wise stand back from the fire, fools are burned on the pyre. The mystic becomes one with the flame. The fire and he are the same.’ “ He beams expectantly, and then repeats, “The mystic becomes one with the flame!”

“Coran, we still don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pidge says.

“Was that Lotor’s poem?” Hunk asks.

“What do you think the flame is?” Coran asks. 

Reflexively, everyone looks out the front screen, at the white hole. Lance raises a hand and says, “It’s where the magic or whatever comes from.”

“No,” Coran says, “Actually - well, still no, but close. Really, Number One - all that time with open access to Altean knowledge, and you didn’t learn our stories?”

Shiro looks offended, then impatient. “Coran!” Keith says, partly since Shiro can’t but mostly because he’s impatient too, his heart being squeezed between the fear of punishment and the worse fear of hope. “Just tell us, okay?”

“The _poem,_ as you called it,” Coran says, “is actually a sixteen thousand stanza epic, which tells the story of the building of Oriande by ancient Alteans. You might have heard Allura speak of them as the Sages of Oriande, but we also call them the Life Givers. They created Altean alchemy, and they believed in the preservation of life above all else. The fire is - well, of course as an adult I assumed this was only a metaphor, but the fire represents a promise that our civilization will always go on, no matter what. That our way of life will always be kept safe. It’s also apparently - as you all saw when you tried to enter Oriande the first time - quite literal.”

Hunk slaps both hands over his own mouth. His eyes are huge. “No way,” he says, muffled through his hands. Shiro looks up at him and, hesitantly, makes a claw over his face and rakes it backwards up and over his head. Hunk nods faintly, and Shiro’s face goes as white as his hair. 

“Our side needed power too,” Pidge says slowly. “But Altean technology doesn’t run off processed quintessence like Galra tech does. It needs to be channeled, either through Balmeran crystals or through the alchemists themselves.”

“Guys, please don’t be mysterious,” Lance says nervously. “The suspense is _killing me_ , can someone just say explain what Coran’s talking about so we can all freak out and then _do something_ about it?”

“One with the fire,” Keith repeats. His lips feel numb. “She’s - they used her as a power source?”

Coran sobers abruptly. “Still are, if my guess is correct. Altean alchemy cannot be founded on death. It just wouldn’t work. So Allura must be -”

“She’s alive,” Lance whispers.

“She’s alive!” Pidge crows.

“Allura’s alive!” Hunk sobs, and stumbles forward until he’s close enough to wrap his arms around the nearest Paladin, and everything becomes a confusion of limbs and crying and shaking. Keith isn’t crying. His neck feels numb where Lance’s hand is wrapped around it. His face is numb, where Shiro’s forehead is resting against his own. Everyone is so happy, without reservation. They don’t realize. They’re not thinking. They don’t know what it means.

“But that means,” Keith says, “that means that she’s been their prisoner this whole time. That we _left her_. She’s been - ” And he goes cold and rigid all over, as the last missing piece slots into his mind. “Oh god, she _is_ alive. She’s been trying to reach me all along.” 

He pushes away from the Paladins. Puts his hands up as Shiro reaches for him, maybe automatically. He has to say this. Has to come all the way clean. “I, I’ve had dreams about her,” he tells them, “for decaphoebs. Nightmares. Almost since the end of the war. Sometimes I’m being chased, sometimes she’s falling, or _reaching_ for me - I didn’t know they were real! I thought they were,” but the words falter almost as soon as he speaks them. He thinks of the other times he’s had _dreams_ \- of blue lions in desert caves, of Shiro being alive against all the odds in the universe - and the horror of it fills his mouth. “I didn’t know!” 

After a moment, Shiro untangles himself from the others. He doesn’t go far; just settles himself back down a little distance away, his long legs folded tailor style, ankles neatly crossed. He faces Keith dead on, and reaches out one hand. “Shiro, don’t,” Keith says warningly. Shiro blows a sigh out through his nose. He jerks his head over his shoulder, towards the front of the shuttle - towards the distant spectre of the white hole and Oriande. He shakes his hand, his fingers spread wide. 

Keith stares at Shiro, at his outstretched hand. His heart is pounding. His emotions have been yanked in so many directions that he’s not sure what to feel at all - except for scared. He’s always scared. He wants to beg forgiveness. He wants to look away 

Keith closes his eyes, and reaches back.

At first he feels nothing but the red-tinted darkness behind his own eyelids, the afterimage of adrenaline. He used to be able to do this so easily. Slipping into each other’s minds came as naturally as breathing some days. He’d surface from Voltron not knowing where his body stopped and Hunk’s or Pidge’s bodies began. His consciousness had stretched across the stars. 

The old words slip to him like a mantra, which they had been when the Lions and piloting and war were all new to him: patience yields focus.

Once - back in those days when he’d said that mantra over and over again, every time he’d had to climb into Red’s cockpit - Keith and Allura had gotten lost, far away from the others. The shuttle they were in had malfunctioned, and since its programming was corroded with age it had mistaken Pidge’s engine modification for a critical failure, and immediately ejected both of them into open space. It’s a story that people bring up sometimes on the Marmora’s humanitarian missions, because on the _Voltron Show_ it was played as a goofy, humanizing moment and for once, that’s more or less what it was. The shuttle velocity had been low, and they’d ended up only a few hundred yards from each other, a distance easily crossed with short bursts from their jet packs. The hardest part had been catching each other’s hands, since Allura had been spinning one direction and Keith had been spinning in the other, and though they’d been arguing about something in the moments before the alarm sounded, the way they’d both slapped frantically at each other and missed had made them laugh so hard Allura had nearly cried. 

For once, he lets himself remember the sound of her laughing, and how it had felt when they were laughing together. 

The bright pulse of pain in his head sharpens to a point. Instinctively he reaches towards it, grasps onto the thread of connection. It _hurts_ , and he almost flinches back, but the hurt passes and then starts to feel more like a deadened limb coming slowly back to life, that burning tingling feeling passing through his fingers and his face, loosening the grip around his throat. He exhales, and finds his chest filling with energy to _pull_. So he _pulls_ , and finds himself being pulled forward too. Behind his eyes bloom trillions of stars, and from each star blooms trillions of - possibilities, maybe, or different realities and timelines - he doesn’t know, he doesn’t have the language to describe it, just the fierce, impractical wish that Shiro could see it too, his refuge made real and vital. Because it _is_ vital, and _alive_ \- he feels that life like a heartbeat in his palms as he pulls and is pulled through the collective consciousness of the universe. He knows where he’s going now. He _sees her_ , just up ahead.

She burns with a fury so white and hot that she’s become the sun, a star in her own right, tangled and trapped in the sticky threads of reality, and they collide with the full force of each of their strengths, yanking the other closer and closer through the stars. Her anger meets his own and is shared, multiplied, renewed. They fill each other with joyful recognition. 

It’s hard to pull away. Hard at first to recognize even where she ends and he begins. But he’s not leaving her - they will never, ever leave her again - he’s leading her home. They hold on to each other as he _pulls_ back, hand over hand, through each branching possibility of life and back to the reality that they know.

He comes back to himself with an exhale of breath, that blazing light fading until it’s just the darkness behind his own eyes again. He feels a cool hand on his face, wiping away the tears he didn’t realize were slipping down his cheeks. He fills his own body, present in it in a way he’d forgotten how to be. His other hand is enveloped in Shiro’s. Everyone is gathered closely around them, watching Keith, hardly breathing, and when he smiles they all exhale at once. Coran is crying. So is Hunk. Pidge and Lance have their arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders, their heads knocked together. And Shiro - Shiro is grinning at Keith, no pretense or fear, no uncertainty, no judgement - the same uncomplicated joy that Keith is feeling too, so Keith leans forward and kisses him.

“That’s the least shocking thing that’s happened all day,” he hears Pidge say, distantly. Shiro laughs noiselessly, his breath warm on Keith’s mouth. Keith laughs too. He leans forward and touches his forehead to Shiro’s, and they laugh together.

Coran’s arms go around both of them and squeeze. “Come on, Paladins,” he says. “We’ve still got to figure out how to save our girl.”

“No need,” Keith says, and presses his palms against Shiro’s cheeks, kissing him just once more before standing. “She’s saving us.”

He points, and as one the others turn. It’s like a layer of dead skin has been peeled off of him: he can _feel_ them, just like he can feel the distant fire of Allura burning, generating the white hole that burns around Oriande. Pidge bolts to her feet, and her excitement bubbles around Keith’s shoulders. “No way,” Hunk says, and Keith feels it squeeze damply around his heart. 

From the heart of the white hole, so distant that they’re barely five points of color blocking out the light but getting closer by the second, come the Voltron Lions. Allura’s found them, just as surely as Keith found her. They’ll bring each other home.

Lance says, “Wait, do you -” He looks at Keith, speechless for once in his life. 

“Yeah,” Keith says. “You okay with it?”

Lance shrugs and says, “We never got to pick in the first place. They choose us.” He puts a hand on Keith’s shoulder and grins, his eyes wet. “Besides, Allura’s alive. What else matters?”

Shiro’s the only one who hasn’t moved. He’s still crouched on one knee, like he could run the rest of the way to Oriande. He’s perfectly, painfully still. His shoulders twitch when Keith’s fingertips brush the back of his neck. It’s like plunging his hand into a churning river, hot and anxious and uncertain. “You feel them too, don’t you,” Keith says softly. “You feel the bond.” Shiro looks up, and just as quickly looks away. Then he nods, just once.

It’s the closest Keith has ever seen Shiro come to crying, in all the years Keith has known the man - almost half his life at this point. The river washes over him with giddy hope, and Shiro nods again, smiling like he can’t help it. Keith holds out a hand, and Shiro takes it. They stand shoulder to shoulder to face the others.

“We’re gonna have to be quick,” Keith says. “The wolf can take us to our Lions, but we’ll need to get through the white hole before the Castleships can catch up to us.”

“Won’t they just follow us in?” Lance asks.

Keith shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem,” he says. He looks around at the others. “You ready, Paladins?”

Next to him, Shiro shivers. 

The Lions move fast - they close the hundreds of thousands of kilometers almost too quickly to track. They can only hope that the alarms on the three Castleships still searching for them will sound too late for the Alteans to react. They jump to Yellow as a group as soon as she gets close enough. Hunk hustles into the pilot’s seat, which lights up at his touch. Through the Lion’s eyes, they see the stars and the ship graveyard spin abruptly, as Yellow moves to cover the others as their Paladins get in place. They drop Pidge with Green next, and then Lance, who looks around at his Lion’s cockpit like he’s in a dream. 

“Yeah,” he says to Keith, just before he and Shiro and Coran move on, “We’re good.”

Black’s cockpit is the same size as the other Lions, despite how much bigger the rest of her is. Keith always felt fooled by that, like it was some strange illusion that the shoes he’d stepped into were the same size as his own. He was her Paladin for longer than Shiro ever was, but he’d said “No” on every step of the path that had led him there, and even as the leader of Voltron he’d never once felt like Black was really _his_. They’d found a way to work together, but maybe this time - 

Keith holds his breath as they appear in her cockpit. Beside him, he knows that Shiro is doing the same. 

They lock eyes, and grin helplessly at each other. 

Through Black’s viewscreen, Keith can see the Castleships turning towards them. They’ll be fired upon as soon as the Alteans get a fix on the Lions. There’s no time to savor the moment, the way there would be if their lives really were like the _Voltron Show_ \- but as Keith grabs hold of the wolf’s fur, he turns anyway for one last look over his shoulder to see the Lion light up purple, and for the Black Paladin to take his place. And then Keith is alone where he began - in a darkly gleaming cockpit, throwing himself into the pilot’s seat, throwing his consciousness wide with _hope_. 

The world flares Red, and the stars blur together, and he’s home.

The Lions wheel towards the white hole, Black in the lead. The Castleships send the first volleys, powerful enough to crack Galra shielding, and Keith rolls and dips between them, between the ghosts of dead ships. He can _feel_ the others, bright as anything, the spaces between each Lion twanging and vibrating like a stretched rubber band. The light from the white hole calls them closer.

He catches Shiro’s eye in the viewscreen, Coran just barely in sight behind his shoulder. “Black doesn’t work like the _Atlas_ , huh?” he asks. The others are watching them - focused on closing the distance to Oriande and their friend, but waiting for orders. Shiro shakes his head, then holds up two fingers spread wide in a V.

“Ooooh, I wanna say it, I wanna say it,” Hunk says, and when Shiro grins and throws him a nod he crows it out. 

“ _Form Voltron!_ ” 

The mental link Keith has with the others deepens as metal shifts and slots into place. They feel him too now, all of them stretching and twining together, forming something unbreakable. He’d missed this so hard it feels like his bones have never stopped aching for it, like he’s been frozen through for five decaphoebs. None of the movies and operas and plays and TV series had ever captured how it had felt.

“They’re coming!” Pidge shouts. “They primed the ion cannons!” 

Voltron wheels to face the Castleships. They’ve spread out to face him, turrets pointed forward and gathering those telltale beads of light. The motions are instinctive. The strategy clear,even though the assessment, adjustment of tactics, and course of action aren’t his own, but belong to all of them. Shiro can’t call out the orders, but they already know what to do.

_Form Blazing Sword!_

There’s no defense. Nothing that the Castleships can do. Voltron dodges the first ion blasts easily. They use massive downed ships to slingshot themselves closer, leaving trails of fire in their wake. The power of the sword thrums all the way through Red, all the way through Keith’s body. He’s holding the sun in his soul. 

They strike surgically. The ion cannons. The engines. Casualties minimal and unavoidable. The sword cuts through each hull like its paper, and suck the unlucky crew out in its wake. Bodies pinwheel past Keith’s viewscreen, and in the gaping wounds they leave behind he can see the lights of each Castleship flicker and go out. 

Voltron turns. For a moment there’s one mind that holds the wheel, who looks over his work and the shell of the _Atlas_ floating behind their long ago allies, dead and empty. 

Then they turn away, and disappear into the light.

Immediately, they’re blasted backwards by energy. Voltron’s arms come up instinctively, buffeting against waves and waves of white light. It feels like a solid force, like trying to swim through a planet. “Hold on!” Keith screams, and he feels the others scream with him.

At first the Guardian is barely more than an outline in all that bright light - like staring into the sun until spots appear. It’s so much larger than Keith is expecting, larger than Voltron, larger than the Atlas. It fills the edges of a sky that has none, that has no horizon or shape or depth to it. Just endless light. It’s the first time Keith has seen the Guardian. The white lion was dead by the time Keith stepped foot on Oriande the first time, killed by Haggar in her pursuit of power. “What happens now?” Hunk asks nervously. “Do we fight it?”

Through the screen, Shiro shakes his head. The others don’t answer, not in words, but Keith feels their confidence and excitement bleeding in through Voltron. There’s no fear in any of them, not even as the Guardian opens its mouth and swallows them whole.

When Keith opens his eyes, he finds them in a world of pink mist and little floating islands, dotted with glowing symbols. They blow past it all, intent on the enormous, cratered asteroid at the center of whatever plane of reality they’ve found themselves on. When Keith closes his eyes he can almost see those glowing threads, trillions of them, vanishing in every direction conceivable. It’s beautiful, and his anger bleeds into the others, spurring them on faster. 

Voltron breaks apart as they crash down towards the asteroid’s surface. They all can feel her now, a pulse at the heart of the glowing temple, stretching its spire towards the sky. There are guards running towards them - and robed alchemists in the distance, fighting a white lion that, for a change, is more or less lion sized. Allura is fighting with them, as much as she can, wherever she is.

Keith meets the guards head on, his bayard clashing against their weapons and then cutting through. He’d forgotten this too, how it feels to kill a person. If there is anything that’s truly universal in all the galaxy, in every world Keith has ever been to, it’s that the look of shock as his blade hits home is always the same, the astonishment that death really does find every one of us, no matter what.

At Keith’s side, Shiro is laying his own path of destruction - his teeth bared in a silent snarl, the black bayard smashing its way through the soldiers between them and the white lion, fighting its own battle in the distance. He’s merciless. He’s terrifying. He’s everything Keith has ever wanted, and he’s given Keith a ring. 

God, he’d missed this. 

“You good?” he shouts to Shiro, as they mount the steps of the temple. Shiro flashes him a grin and a wink. Keith risks a glance over his shoulder to check on the others, knowing Shiro has him covered. They take the last alchemist together, Lance and Pidge close behind on the steps, Hunk and Coran bringing up the rear. The white lion roars as the Altean falls to their bayards, and then turns and disappears back into the temple without waiting to make sure they’ll follow. 

“Let’s go!” Keith shouts. It would be an easy choice even if they couldn’t feel Allura drawing them on; the sky is still clear, no sign that the Castleships have sent any flyers into the white hole after them, no way of knowing whether they’d be allowed through to Oriande, but they’re fighting as blind as they’ve ever been, and the temple at least can be defended more easily than the open terrain. 

“Right behind you!” Hunk answers, and together they plunge into the depths.

The white lion leads them deeper and deeper into the cool, still depths. They blur past the desecrated statues of Altean Life Givers and the branching of dozens of different paths. The walls are deeply scored around them, the hieroglyphs scarred and unreadable. The temple itself is a maze, and the light dims and fades away except for the glow of Shiro’s prosthetic and the slash of a white tail, just up ahead. The air sparkles as the light hits dust motes and bounces away. Keith’s breathing comes harsh enough that it fogs the bottom of his visor. Nothing seems to be living down here - they haven’t met a single guard since they crossed the threshold. Was that all the defense Oriande could muster up? Was that really it? Then the lion flickers - and is gone, leaving them alone in the dark. 

Shiro, in the lead, throws an arm up to stop the others. The six of them form a circle instinctively, without noticing that they’re doing it - standing back to back against the darkness. Their breathing is ragged and visible in the chill air. Keith’s undersuit sticks to his skin, cold with sweat. He can smell the others, the sweat and adrenaline of them, the blood and dust caking the joints of their armor. This far into the temple it’s like they’re at the slow beating heart of it: like they’ve ran past the edges of Allura’s power and into the center of her. The temple _surrounds_ her, smothering her - making it impossible to know which path to choose, now that they’ve lost their guide. They’re alone in the dark. They’re jumping at shadows, at sounds they might not really be hearing, shuffling closer and closer. 

Keith feels a pinch at his elbow - it’s Pidge, groping back without looking, her fingers an iron circle around his arm. She’s breathing hard, like they all are, and she’s turned towards the darkness. He can’t see her face and for a moment he’s afraid _for_ her, that it’s too much - but then he sees the grit of her jawline and hears the fury in her panting breaths. 

“We’re too close,” she growls. “They’re not going to beat us. They’re not!” 

She peels away from the circle, running her hands over the ruined glyphs that cover the walls around them. She reads Altean better than any of them, but even Keith can tell that whatever used to be there is as gone as the alchemists who put it there. Even her wrist computer can’t read them, and she makes a furious noise. 

There are seven doors in the little room they’ve found themselves in, not counting the way they came from - and through each, god only knew how many other doors, other paths, other choices. “Coran,” Keith asks, “Do you know where to go? Where they might be holding her?”

Coran flinches as the others turn towards him, accidentally playing their flashlights over his face. “No,” he says, shielding his eyes. “I’m as lost as the rest of you when it comes to the finer details of Oriande. Alchemy was never my specialty, you know.” 

“You knew the poem,” Lance objects.

“It’s a very famous poem,” Coran says.

Pidge slaps her hands ringingly on the stone. She wheels around and snaps, “Turn off the lights!”

They react without question - the flashlights on their wrists winking out, leaving them bathed only in soft blue light. “That too,” Pidge says, and points at Shiro.

Shiro looks down at his shoulder and back up at her, frowning. “Why?” Keith asks. 

It’s hard to tell at the distance and with her face covered by a visor, but he thinks Pidge rolls her eyes. “If the mystic becomes one with the flame, there has to be a flame, right? If we get the room dark, we can see if there’s light coming from any of these tunnels.”

Keith looks at Shiro. Shiro shrugs, and, wincing, reaches towards the glowing port on his shoulder. There’s no off switch - Keith used to lay awake at night watching blue light swim across the ceiling of their room, tracing the bags under Shiro’s eyes and seeing a matching set of his own in the morning. If you get your fingers in between where his shoulder was and where his elbow used to be, it feels like teeth, like being electrocuted. 

Lance gets there first, phasing his bayard back into its thigh holster and covering the port with both hands. Shiro’s hand lands on top of his, and as expected their fingers crackle and hiss, throwing smoke into the dimming light. Keith starts towards them, but what light remains catches on the shine of their teeth, Lance grinning tightly to signal that he’s okay. They’re both okay. The gloves are enough protection, and enough to pitch the room into real darkness. 

Keith sees the others in snatches of movement. The bounce of filtered light off white armor. The sizzling of Shiro’s arm fades, and he and Lance stay frozen in position. There’s a burning smell hazy in the air, just barely thicker than the smell of the old sand and the drying sweat on his own body. Hunk shifts silently from foot to foot. Shiro’s eyes are closed, so after a second Keith closes his too - turns away from Shiro for good measure. 

The light is so faint that at first he thinks he’s wrong, that he’s making it up. He closes his eyes, covers them with one hand, and opens them again. There - the second door to the left - the barest haze of white light, so different than the blue that still tints the shadows. 

“I see it!” he calls, and plunges through.

The flame grows stronger and stronger, as if it had only been waiting for them, and it’s only a few minutes before they burst into an enormous chamber. It’s shaped like the engine room in the Castle of Lions - curved like an egg, with the tops and bottoms stretching far out of sight. A narrow walkway connects them to a circular platform at the middle of the room, which surrounds a glowing, flickering core of light. Turbines dot the surface of the chamber, and if Keith was Hunk or Pidge he’d probably know what they were for, if they channel energy or collect it and how. But any questions he might have die unspoken, as they get nearer to the light.

It’s Allura.

Any illusion they might have had that she’s been sleeping, or in stasis, or left in some semblance of a peaceful prison, is shattered as they draw helplessly closer. Her fingers claw towards the sky. Her teeth are bared, her torso twisted. Her limbs are angles of pain. Her armor is crusted with dirt and blood, her hair half undone, as if they’d picked her body up from the ground and simply flung her up into the air. The locks that have escaped the tight bun she wears for combat float straight upwards, twisting and curling slowly in the diamond dusted air. Her eyes are open, just barely - and starlight leaks from them.

Keith forces himself to look at her, and then at the others, to see the expressions on their faces. Pidge and Hunk both have their wrist computers extended towards her, arguing over whatever’s showing up on their screens. Coran circles helplessly around her feet, like he could pull her back to them physically, if only she was in reach. Lance had drawn up close to Keith as they’d come into the chamber, the two of them flanking Shiro. When Keith looks at him he sees his own horror reflected back, and then Lance stumbles forward and drops to his knees, gagging. His shoulders are bony and thin even under the armor, almost insubstantial when Keith kneels and puts an arm around them.

“You have to,” he says, and finally turns to look at Keith. His eyes are worn and red. His hair is almost as gray as Shiro’s. He’s aged so far beyond the five years that separates Allura from the rest of them. “You have to help her. _Please._ ” 

“Will you help me?” Keith asks, meeting his eyes. He feels very conscious of Shiro standing at his side, watching the two of them, waiting to see what Keith is going to do. Everything feels quiet, even Pidge and Hunk falling silent as they feel the tug of Keith’s focus. Lance frowns at him, not understanding. Not getting it even as he too sways towards Keith, seemingly unconsciously. 

Keith looks around at the other Paladins. Looks up at Allura, twisting slowly in her prison, just barely out of reach. “Like she says, we’re always stronger together,” he says. “Come on, guys. Help me get her the rest of the way home.”

Shiro takes Keith’s left hand. Lance takes the right. Hunk and Pidge pick the chain up on Shiro’s side, and Coran completes it on Lance’s. Inside Keith’s gloves, his palms are sweating. Shiro squeezes his fingertips tightly. They turn as one towards the light.

Keith closes his eyes.

It doesn’t feel like before. The pain in his head is gone, and the thread in his heart released. He feels the others like a part of his own body, but Allura is everywhere and nowhere, as substantial as smoke, obscured still by the heavy walls around them.

_Patience_ , Shiro feeds through their bond, and Keith drags a long breath in and lets it go. 

Focus.

The thing about forming Voltron is - what the movies never got right, what they never seemed to show - is that Voltron is _heavy_. The actors scrunch their eyes closed, concentrate _really hard_ , and the great weapon springs to life. But that’s not what it feels like inside the Lion’s cockpit. It feels like moving mountains. Each step is a dragging, shambling movement, each swing of the sword like lifting a space shuttle by hand. They bear the weight as a physical thing. Keith used to go to sleep feeling like his limbs weighed thousands of pounds, and dream of drowning under the pressure. Voltron is a heavy thing to bear, but never impossible - because that was the other part of being a Paladin, the part that was maybe impossible to actually show, how the burden was by its nature _shared_. As much as Shiro, and then Keith, sat in the heart of the animal and dragged its focus this way or that, Voltron _cannot_ be moved alone. The reaching, the effort, the burden, is never _overcome_ but only made more bearable, and only because they’re not alone, and never could be.

Focus.

It’s hard to see past the walls around them. The white light flickers under and through Keith’s tightly closed eyelids. It _hurts_. Everything hurts. Shiro’s never told him much about what it was like to be under Haggar’s control, but it hurts in the way he imagines that hurt, that his very sense of self is being erased. Emotion swells in him, inexplicable. He can’t tell if it’s Allura or the thing that’s holding her, sucking the life out of her. To let it in feels like death, like actual fire, like he’ll die trying - 

_Focus_.

He knows, distantly, that he’s crushing Shiro and Lance’s hands in his own. But just as real, doubling and tripling in his own mind, is the feeling of his hands being crushed in turn, aching from the other end of their nerve endings. He feels the weight and exhaustion in each of the bodies around him. Keith’s body knows that it would die trying to reach Allura, in all of the sticky, fearful places where instinct lives. It can’t be done alone, but in this place, if no other in all of the universe - in the still center of what, lacking all other words for it, they call _the bond_ \- he never is alone, and neither is she.

Slowly, achingly slowly, the gold threads come into view, like letting his eyes come back into focus. There’s so many that Allura’s body disappears under them. This close he can see the energy flowing _out_ , as if her quintessence were being drawn like blood, drop by drop. The urge to tear her loose is almost overwhelming, but someone - Pidge? - halts the movement before it’s even begun: _We’ll hurt her_.

So it’s slow. They lift their hands and pull gold threads from her like cobwebs. As they sever each strand their minds brush up against the world it connects to, showing them glimpses of universes that feel unrecognizable to their own, impossible planets and people without the context to make them possible, where history went a different way. Keith knows without looking that there are tears in Shiro’s eyes, and feels as one escapes and rolls down a cheek that’s not his own. Abruptly the betrayal feels fresh again, that out of all the choices the Alteans could have made, all the possibilities of the universe, that _this_ was the world they built instead.

There are only a few strands left. The light pulses behind Keith’s eyelids with a weak, sickening tempo. They’re less careful now: they can feel Allura from the other side of the bond, tearing her own way towards them. There’s no way to know what’s happening to the worlds they’re ripping away from the point where it all connects - whether they’ll flicker and die, or just continue on as they always have, as unaware as they were before.

The white light dissolves with the final strand and for just a single moment nothing else happens, Allura’s body still spinning, still suspended, still caught - and then Keith sees her hands curl into fists.

She falls, and Shiro jolts forward and catches her. 

Keith falls too. His knees hit the stone hard, but he doesn’t feel it, doesn’t pay attention. Even Shiro barely looks over at the sound, everyone’s focus drawing tight around Allura. Keith crawls on his hands and knees to get closer, to get an arm around Hunk’s shoulders. He’s gasping for air. He’s soaked with sweat. He feels the weight settle back onto his shoulders - just his now to carry, but it’s all right, everything is all right, because it _worked_ , they _did it_. _Allura is alive_. Her lips press together, her brow drawn tight, fighting her way back to consciousness like she’d fought every step of the way to stay alive, to stay whole, to come home.

“I’m here,” Coran tells her over and over, whispering it into her matted, blood-soaked hair. “We’re here, Allura.”

Her lips part and shape words that are too soft to hear, but they all lean in closer anyway. Under Keith’s dead weight, Hunk is holding his breath. Pidge is perfectly still, her hands clasped under her chin. Lance is holding Allura’s hand in both of his, and Keith can hear the rough material of their gloves rasping against each other. 

“Here,” Hunk says suddenly, and shifts forward, pulling a little flask from his belt. “Give her some water.”

Coran takes it from him, presses the flask against Allura’s lips. Shiro shifts a little to steady her head against his chest. His eyes are blown wide and shocked, like even he didn’t expect to be right, even after fighting and shoving them all each step of the way here. He looks like he’s waiting to wake up.

Little drops of water spill out of Allura’s mouth and leave clean tracks on her skin. After a second she turns away, chest heaving. Her eyes crack open (and for a second Keith is afraid, but the starlight is gone and they’re the same blue-and-pink they’ve always been) and flicker around the circle of them. 

“A - are,” she says, and gulps air, her voice faint and raw. “Are you real?”

Her eyes stay fixed on Shiro even as the rest of them rush to tell her yes, this is real, this is happening. Keith bites his own tongue to stay quiet, waiting - even though there’s no answer that Shiro can give her besides the bare shrug and nod he eventually does. Keith can’t tell from the look on his face what answer Shiro would give if he could.

Allura tips her head back. Tears roll down her cheeks, finding the same path that the water swept clean just a moment ago. She’s shuddering all over, her hand convulsively gripping Lance’s, her armor smearing dirt and blood across Shiro’s, her heels scraping across the stone floor. “I lost hope,” she cries, “so many times. I thought I’d never - ”

The rest is lost to the echoing quiet of the chamber, pitch dark except for the glow of Shiro’s prosthetic, the strips of light on their armor. Keith can barely make out the stricken expressions of the others but he feels the helpless weight of their silence, stretching across a gulf so much bigger than they’d known. If this were the movie of their lives, someone would say something that made a difference. That could make up for the decaphoebs Allura spent being sealed away, left to carry the weight of the universe on her shoulders. Any of them could do it, could make the speech. Keith himself could do it. Could start with the words that have been caught in his mouth for five years: _I’m sorry._

What happens instead is that an alarm on Pidge’s belt goes off. All of them tense, except for Allura, who sags into Shiro’s chest, her lips pressing tightly together. Guiltily, Pidge says, “There are ships entering Oriande’s atmosphere.”

“From the Castleships?” Keith asks. 

“Most likely,” she says, her eyes darting to Allura and back. Allura’s eyes are closed. Pulling herself back together. Shoulders straightening. Her breathing evening out. 

“We gotta go,” Keith says, when no one else does. He feels guilty too. He can’t look away from Allura. “We have to get back to the Lions.” Adds, helplessly, knowing it’s not enough, that it doesn’t scratch the surface of what they’ll have to say to each other later, “I’m sorry.”

Allura’s eyes open, and find Keith’s. He feels it like a shot to the chest, like she’s still reaching across the universe and into all of the secret parts of him. It’s just for a moment - they only have a moment - not nearly enough time to decipher the look in her eyes, the shifting of pain and relief. She closes her eyes and nods, just the barest dip of her chin, but every nerve in Keith’s body stays crackling and alert. 

“Help me to stand,” Allura says.

Coran, Lance, and Hunk dive forward at once, arms outstretched. They falter when she flinches back, her hands lifting to ward them off. She’s sitting up on her own now, her spine curved under the weight of her shoulders, the unsteady line of her neck. Shiro’s legs are folded under him, both hands knuckled on the ground. “I can walk,” Allura says. “I’m _fine_.” Her jaw is a tense line. The look on her face feels unfamiliar, until he remembers - he’s seen it once before in Shiro’s memories. 

The others falter. “Allura,” Lance says, “you haven’t been on your feet for _decaphoebs_ , let us -”

“ _No!_ ” she says. “I won’t be carried!” She shifts up onto her knees, but as soon as she brings one leg up under herself it buckles, and she falls hard before any of them can catch her, the heels of her hands slamming against the stone. The impact echoes around the chamber, reverberating strangely - getting louder and louder as the sound bounces against the silent turbines until the very walls are shaking. Keith feels fine, gritty dust drift down from the ceiling and stick to his hair, his sweat-damp skin. Hunk and Coran flinch back, their eyes darting up to find where the tremors are coming from, but Lance stays exactly where he is, one hand outstretched. 

“Okay,” he says. Keith can’t see his face, but his voice is soft and even. “Okay. I won’t carry you. But can I help?”

Pidge’s alarm trills again. Keith rubs his hands over his thighs as if he can wipe the sweat away from his palms that way. Even Shiro looks uneasy, craning his chin over his shoulder towards the dark edges of the room. Hunk shifts from one leg to the other, his mouth working. The display above Pidge’s wrist shows at least ten ships moving into Oriande’s atmosphere. From this distance Keith can’t tell the size of them, but no matter how big the ships are they’ll be full of Alteans who know the ground better than they do. They have to go. They have to _go_.

Keith takes a deep breath. Holds it. Breathes out. Feels his shoulders droop with it. The moment stretches, as they watch Allura watch Lance’s hand, outstretched, steady, unyielding, as if it’s a trick. No one moves. Not until Allura’s jaw firms. She reaches up, and takes Lance’s hand.

“All right,” Lance says. “I’m gonna take your elbow, just to help you stay steady on the way up, okay?” As he speaks he puts words to action, telling her where he’s going to touch before he does it, letting her lean on him to gain her feet. Coran moves immediately to take her other arm, and between the two of them Allura takes step after faltering step. Keith is still kneeling and the perspective, looking up at them, is strange in the dark room. They tower over him, the blue light throwing their shadows into the dim unknown. He realized, a little belatedly, that he’s the last one still on the ground.

He takes the hand that Shiro holds out. Leans into the fleeting touch of Shiro’s fingertips, ghosting over his cheek and down the line of his jaw, before they release each other. The ground feels solid and unyielding beneath his feet. The others are a steady thrum around him, distinct, surrounding him. He _knows_ they’re ready, can see it in their faces and feel it in their hearts. 

“Okay,” Keith says, and their attention zeroes in on him, even Allura’s. “If the Coalition sends forces into the temple, we’ll be at a disadvantage. They know this place a lot better than we do. We need to be prepared for an ambush. Shiro, Hunk, you guys take the front. Pidge, you’re gonna be in the rear with me.” He does his best to meet Allura’s gaze. His voice stays steady even as his heart slams against his chest. “We’ll shield you as best we can.” 

She hasn’t bothered to fix her hair, or wipe the blood off her chin. “We’ve got our work cut out for us already,” she says to him. 

“We do,” he says, and she smiles. It’s a softer look than he’s expecting, and he feels the echoes of it through the others, as they all straighten up, soothed, ready to receive their orders. Stardust falls from the corner of her eyes and she brushes it away easily, her hand returning to Coran’s after. The temple shudders again, dust raining down on their heads. 

“Good,” she says. “These walls have stood for too long already.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again so much to Eia (@appease), Daphne Blithe (@daphneblithe), Ayla (@ataraxetta), and @LadyVictory for your patience and help over the last few months! This story was a beast to write and you all made it a joy.
> 
> Thank you everyone for reading! You can find me [on twitter @hansbekhart.](https://twitter.com/hansbekhart)


End file.
